What Is Attention? Types and How They Work

What is attention?

Right now these words have your attention, while the feel of your chair and the sounds around you mostly do not, until someone says your name. Attention is the process that selects some information for processing and keeps it there while the rest is ignored.

It is not one single ability. Researchers describe several kinds, each measured with its own tasks:

The kinds overlap, and every real task uses more than one of them.

Selective attention

In hearing, selective attention is often called the cocktail-party problem: how you follow one voice when several people are talking. Classic experiments in 1953 studied it by playing listeners two spoken messages at once, or a different message to each ear ^[1].

In vision, a classic theory of attention, feature-integration theory, proposes that attention has to visit items one at a time whenever a target can only be told apart by a combination of features, such as a particular shape in a particular colour ^[2]. By the same theory, a target that differs by a single simple feature, like a red dot among green ones, can be found without that item-by-item search, so it seems to "pop out" ^[2].

On LaserMind, Find the Odd One is a visual-search task. Each session has 24 displays of 8, 16 or 24 symbols, with exactly one that is different. Level 1 hides a Q among Os; level 2 an O among Qs, which is harder because the odd one is missing a feature; level 3 a T among Ls at random angles. Besides your median time, the search slope shows how many milliseconds each extra symbol adds: a flat slope means the odd one popped out, a steep one means you checked items one by one.

Listen & Count practises the hearing side. You press Listen, hear a run of short beeps at two pitches, and type how many high beeps you heard. Higher levels bring more beeps, closer pitches and shorter gaps, and your main number is how many of the 6 runs you counted exactly. Use headphones at a low, comfortable volume; results depend on your device and your hearing, so compare them only with your own.

Sustained attention

Sustained attention is keeping your mind on a task over time, especially a dull one where little happens. Its failures are familiar: reading the same paragraph three times, or pressing "reply all" on autopilot.

A well-known lab test, the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), asks people to press a key for every item but hold back on a rare target, about one in nine ^[3]. In the study that introduced it, worse performance on the task went with more everyday attention slips, as reported by 75 healthy participants and by people who knew them, and false presses tended to follow a run of speeded-up responses, which the authors read as attention drifting into automatic responding ^[3].

On LaserMind, Target Watch (Go/No-Go) uses a similar structure in its "Hold back on X" mode. Letters flash for a quarter of a second, and you press for every letter except X, which is about 1 in 9 of the 72 letters. In "Catch the X" mode you press only for X (about 1 in 5 of 60 letters). Higher levels shorten the gap between letters and add look-alike letters. Results include false presses, median response time and d′, which measures how well you tell "press" letters from "hold" letters regardless of how often you press.

Divided attention and switching

Divided attention means attending to two things at once. Researchers study it by asking people to do two tasks together and comparing that with doing each alone. As one research team summarises, using a phone is well documented to go with poorer performance on whatever else you are doing at the same time, because limited attention has to be shared between the tasks ^[4].

Task switching means moving attention from one task or rule to another. In lab studies, people respond substantially more slowly, and usually less accurately, just after a switch; having time to prepare shrinks this switch cost but does not remove it ^[5].

On LaserMind, Switch the Rule measures that cost. A digit from 1 to 9 (never 5) appears under a rule: for ODD/EVEN, odd goes to F and even to J; for LESS/MORE than 5, less goes to F and more to J. The rule appears half a second before the digit, and it changes on 25% or 50% of the 48 trials, as you choose. Your main number is the switch cost: your median time on trials where the rule changed minus trials where it stayed the same, counting correct answers only.

For practical ways to reduce switching in your own work, see How to focus better.

The three attention networks

A widely used model from neuroscience describes attention as three networks of brain regions, each with its own job ^[6]:

• Alerting produces and maintains a state of readiness and vigilance during a task.
• Orienting prioritises sensory input by selecting a location or a sense, such as where to look or what to listen to.
• Executive control is involved in monitoring conflict and in top-down control. A familiar example of conflict is a colour word printed in a different ink colour, as in the Stroop test.

The authors first proposed this framework in 1990 and updated it in 2012 to take in two decades of research ^[6]. It is a theory of how attention is organised. It is not evidence that any exercise strengthens a network.

Attention and working memory

Attention is often confused with working memory. Working memory is the small, short-lived store you use to keep information in mind while you work with it ^[7]. The two are closely linked but not the same: attention is about selecting, working memory about holding and using. Many tasks need both: in Listen & Count, for example, you select the high beeps and also keep a running count.

Can you train attention?

Practising an attention task makes you better at that task. Whether the gain spreads further is the real question, and the answer so far is "only a little, and not reliably".

• Visual search. In lab experiments, a few hundred practice trials turned some slow, item-by-item searches into fast, parallel ones, and this learning was far less specific than learning in some other visual tasks ^[8]. Younger and older adults trained to find camouflaged objects improved substantially and kept that skill when searching for new camouflaged objects ^[9]. Both are lab studies of search tasks; neither tested attention in daily life.
• Go/No-Go. In a double-blind randomised trial with 122 healthy adults, three weeks of adaptive go/no-go and stop-signal training improved those tasks substantially, but no more than practising non-adaptive versions did, so there was no conclusive evidence of a real gain in inhibitory control ^[10]. In another study, adaptive go/no-go training improved the trained task and a similar task with other stimuli in both children (10–12) and young adults (18–24); short-lived transfer to other skills appeared only in the children ^[11].
• Switching. In a small study with an active control group, 31 university students who practised a switching task for 21 days reduced their switch costs and improved on another switching task, but not on tests of interference control, response inhibition, working memory or IQ ^[12].
• Listening. Computer-based listening training has mainly been studied in adults with hearing loss. A systematic review found that trained tasks improved, but gains in untrained speech understanding were small and not robust, and study quality was very low to moderate ^[13].

Frequently asked questions

Is concentration the same as attention? Concentration is the everyday word for selective and sustained attention working together on one task. Researchers separate the kinds because each can be measured on its own.

Can these exercises show whether I have an attention disorder? No. They are practice tasks, not clinical tests, and they have no norms for diagnosis. If you are worried about your attention, speak to a doctor or other qualified professional.

References

1. Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5), 975–979. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1907229
2. Treisman, A. M., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12(1), 97–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(80)90005-5
3. Robertson, I. H., Manly, T., Andrade, J., Baddeley, B. T., & Yiend, J. (1997). "Oops!": Performance correlates of everyday attentional failures in traumatic brain injured and normal subjects. Neuropsychologia, 35(6), 747–758. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0028-3932(97)00015-8
4. Stothart, C., Mitchum, A., & Yehnert, C. (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(4), 893–897. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000100
5. Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 134–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00028-7
6. Petersen, S. E., & Posner, M. I. (2012). The attention system of the human brain: 20 years after. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 35(1), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-062111-150525
7. Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 8, 47–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60452-1
8. Sireteanu, R., & Rettenbach, R. (1995). Perceptual learning in visual search: Fast, enduring, but non-specific. Vision Research, 35(14), 2037–2043. https://doi.org/10.1016/0042-6989(94)00295-W
9. Neider, M. B., Boot, W. R., & Kramer, A. F. (2010). Visual search for real world targets under conditions of high target–background similarity: Exploring training and transfer in younger and older adults. Acta Psychologica, 134(1), 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.12.001
10. Enge, S., Behnke, A., Fleischhauer, M., Küttler, L., Kliegel, M., & Strobel, A. (2014). No evidence for true training and transfer effects after inhibitory control training in young healthy adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 987–1001. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036165
11. Zhao, X., Chen, L., & Maes, J. H. R. (2018). Training and transfer effects of response inhibition training in children and adults. Developmental Science, 21(1), e12511. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12511
12. Zhao, X., Wang, H., & Maes, J. H. R. (2020). Training and transfer effects of extensive task-switching training in students. Psychological Research, 84(2), 389–403. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1059-7
13. Henshaw, H., & Ferguson, M. A. (2013). Efficacy of individual computer-based auditory training for people with hearing loss: A systematic review of the evidence. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e62836. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062836
14. Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100616661983