Honors Seminar 1

Varieties of attention

immediate, derived, (passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless), or active and voluntary, sensorial attention, and intellectual attention

sensorial attention

things we can see, smell, or touch

intellectual attention

things we think about in our minds

immediate

as soon as you see it or hear about it you’re excited

derived

it’s cool or interesting by association

passive

can be intense, voluminous, or sudden, or for whatever reason instantly grabs our attention and has a directly exciting quality

active

always derived, we make an effort to pay attention

attentional networks

alerting, then orienting, and finally, executive control

alerting

used when we maintain vigilance during a task, like trying to concentrate on writing a report to meet a deadline

orienting

used when we prioritize and select stimuli to focus on, such as when we find an email from our manager in our inbox that must be answered first, or when we choose to respond to an incoming text

executive control

manages interference of irrelevant stimuli like an offensive lineman does in football, so that we can maintain focus, such as when we try to restrain ourselves from responding to distractions

working spheres

when multitasking, we can zoom out to examine how people switch between projects, such as writing a research paper or preparing a proposal

schema

can happen when checking a text, something routinely or can happen when you are consciously doing something, you need to constantly retrieve each schema from your long term memory after switching from doing something else

kinetic attention

a dynamic state of attention characterized by rapid shifts, such as between applications, social media, and internet sites, or between the computer and phone

executive function

the governor of the mind, has the heroic task of managing different types of processes: prioritizing and switching tasks, decision-making, sustaining and allocating attention, using working memory, and also practicing self-regulation, trouble starts when we try to deal with multiple tasks and experience many interruptions

cognitive resources

you expend different resources when you do visual, auditory, or spatial types of operations, more cognitive resources are being used up when you do harder tasks, can be replenished

attention span

limited cognitive resource that we allocate to different tasks, its dynamic, has decreased, focused attention: when you’re highly engaged and challenged, rote attention: activity is engaging but not challenging, boredom: when a task lacks both engagement and challenge, frustration: when a task is highly challenging but deeply unengaging