How Attention Works: The Brain’s Anti-Distraction System Discovered

Attention is only partly about what we focus on, but also about what we manage to ignore.

Attention is only partly about what we focus on, but also about what we manage to ignore.

Neuroscientists have pinpointed the neural activity involved in avoiding distraction, a new study reports.

This is the first study showing that our brains rely on an active suppression system to help us focus on the task at hand (Gaspar & McDonald, 2014).

The study’s lead author, John Gaspar, explained the traditional view of attentional control:

“This is an important discovery for neuroscientists and psychologists because most contemporary ideas of attention highlight brain processes that are involved in picking out relevant objects from the visual field.

It’s like finding Waldo in a Where’s Waldo illustration.”

While this process is important, it doesn’t tell the whole story of how attention works.

Gaspar continued:

“Our results show clearly that this is only one part of the equation and that active suppression of the irrelevant objects is another important part.”

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, involved 47 students carrying out a visual search task while their brain signals were monitored.

The finding may have important implications for psychological disorders which involve problems with attention.

The study’s senior author, John McDonald, said:

“…disorders associated with attention deficits, such as ADHD and schizophrenia, may turn out to be due to difficulties in suppressing irrelevant objects rather than difficulty selecting relevant ones.”

Image credit: Bruno Butot

William James on Attention and the Road to Mastery

“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.” ― William James

“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.” ― William James

William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, wrote over 100 years ago that:

“One of the most extraordinary facts about our life is that, although we are besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole sensory surface, we notice so very small a part of them. […] Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those that do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery…” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)

What William James was talking about was our incredible ability to focus selectively on one thing, while blocking out almost everything else.

It’s something we often do so easily that it’s surprising to find out just how good we are at it–much better than many might imagine.

That’s one of the reasons that one particular research paper, called Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, published in 1999, has become so well-known.

Here’s a video, called ‘The Monkey Business Illusion‘ that explains the study:

Watching this again it still seems incredible to me that this ‘works’ on so many people, myself included.

We might feel like fools for getting ‘caught’ by the monkey business illusion, but we should take comfort in the fact that it demonstrates the ability to focus attention.

This, according to William James, is the road to mastery:

“…whether the attention come by grace of genius or dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. […] And education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)

Are Men or Women Better at Multitasking?

Do gender differences in multitasking exist?

Do large, consistent gender differences in multitasking exist?

First a confession: I have never understood the popular fascination with whether women (or men) are better at multitasking.

That’s because multitasking is something that’s best avoided for any task that needs concentration. Humans don’t multitask well, unless one of the activities is automatic and doesn’t require much (conscious) processing.

Still, one of the reasons the question keeps coming back is because of the media obsession with the battle of the sexes; they like to report anything that shows even the most minuscule psychological gender differences.

As a result what we get is the news that, one week, women are better at multitasking and the next week it’s men.

Part of the reason you see these articles is that some studies do indeed find a small superiority for women and some find a small superiority for men, depending on the exact tasks.

But let’s take a real-world activity like driving. What if you compare how good men and women are at driving while talking on a mobile phone? Now, somewhere at the back of your mind, perhaps, there may be prejudices brewing.

Stifle those thoughts, though, because Watson and Strayer (2010) have found no difference between men and women on this sort of multitasking.

And it turns out that this is the case in general for multitasking. Overall studies struggle to find strong, consistent evidence one way or the other (Strayer et al., 2013).

Certainly, some people, both men and women, are better multitaskers than others, and that is interesting. But as for the difference between men and women, the truth is there is much more variation amongst men and women than there is between men and women.

As ever with a young science like psychology, the balance of evidence may change in the future, but at the moment the best guess is that the differences are very small or non-existent.

So the next time someone makes a comment about gender differences in multitasking, you can say: “Rubbish, I read on PsyBlog that there are no proven differences between men and women at multitasking.”

Image credit: Rodrigo Sombra

Attentional Blink and the Stream of Consciousness

Participants in psychology studies, after focusing their attention on a particular target, show a strange gap in their attention: a kind of blind spot.

Yesterday I was sitting in a park staring off into the distance, without a care in the world.

The park was empty, the sky blue, trees rustling; a small lake shimmering in the distance, nudging its banks. A lone figure approached across the grass, not yet identifiable as a man or a woman in the haze; I returned to my reverie, lulled by the air sliding across my brow, lost to sensation.

Then in an instant the figure, now obviously a man, was not 5 metres away, striding towards me. He had travelled 50 metres in what seemed like the blink of an eye. My muscles tensed and I prepared to defend myself. He reached where I sat, then turned away, following the path past and away from me, leaving me looking both surprised and foolish.

It was obvious I had been distracted for much longer than I thought — long enough for the man to walk 50 metres — but still it felt to me as though he had covered the distance in an instant. In fact the man had simply fallen through the cracks in my consciousness.

Attentional blink

Just how frequent these cracks are is demonstrated by a classic study which was the first in the psychological literature to report the phenomenon of ‘attentional blink’ (Broadbent and Broadbent, 1987). These researchers were inspired by unpublished reports that participants in psychology studies, after focusing their attention on a particular target, showed a strange gap in their attention — a kind of blind spot.

To examine it Broadbent and Broadbent flashed up a series of five-letter words to participants at about 10 every second and asked them to search for two particular words. Normally people are remarkably good at this sort of test despite the words only being shown for a tenth of a second — they will usually spot about 80% of the targets.

But what Broadbent and Broadbent found was that when one target followed the other in quick succession (less than half a second apart) participants didn’t notice the second item and the average proportion of correct reports went down to almost 0%. It was as though participants’ attention had ‘blinked’ for half a second after spotting the first target and so they didn’t notice the second.

This phenomenon has subsequently been extensively examined and even found in the auditory domain (Koelewijn & Van der Burg, 2007). One strong explanation for it is a processing bottle-neck. When spotting the first thing we’re looking for it takes an attentional effort to focus on it. This maxes out the brain’s processing abilities for as much as half a second, during which time our attention is effectively blinking.

During that half a second it’s as though the unconscious is knocking on the door of consciousness to report something interesting. Effectively it takes us half a second to answer the door and see who’s there, but in the meantime we don’t notice the phone ringing and the kettle boiling.

The stream of consciousness?

What the attentional blink demonstrates is the illusory component of our everyday experience of consciousness. We experience the world as one long continuous stream of thoughts, feelings and events, each neatly seguing into the next. But the existence of the attentional blink points to a somewhat different story.

Our brains are actually paying attention to one event or thing which swallows up our attention, blocking out other inputs for short periods, then it releases and fixates on something else. In this sense consciousness is less of a smooth stream and more of a bumpy ride.

Reading is a good analogy. When we read the conscious experience is of the eye gliding smoothly across the page. In fact the eye is rapidly saccading, fixating every 7-9 characters — a fact bourne out by eye-tracking studies.

Just as the difference between the experience of reading and how it really works is huge, so the difference between the experience of attention and how it really works is also huge. For good or ill we are caught in a world of metaphorical attentional blinks which, like literal eye-blinks, we usually don’t notice because consciousness papers over the cracks.

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18 Ways Attention Goes Wrong

When attention goes badly wrong it can play some nasty tricks on us.

Imagine if every time you walked into a room with a neatly turned down bed, you automatically took off your clothes and got into it — even though it wasn’t bedtime, wasn’t your bed, and wasn’t even your home. This might sound fanciful but it’s a documented behaviour of patients with attentional problems caused by brain damage (Lhermitte, 1983).

Continue reading “18 Ways Attention Goes Wrong”

Can Visual Attention Truly Be Divided?

It might feel like you’re attending to the speeding car and the hapless child at the same time, but it’s just consciousnesses up to its old tricks.

Psychologists have devised all sorts of ingenious experiments for delving into the mind. And nowhere is that ingenuity better tested than in the psychology of attention.

Continue reading “Can Visual Attention Truly Be Divided?”