Topic
Attention research, explained
29 open-access attention studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Can loading your vision stop your mind from wandering?
When a visual task demands a high level of perceptual focus, it naturally reduces the rate of task-unrelated thoughts.
- Is breath counting a valid measure of mindfulness?
Tracking breath counts offers an objective, reliable behavioral measure of mindfulness that avoids the biases of self-report questionnaires.
- Can a demanding visual task make us deaf to sounds?
When people did a hard visual search, they became genuinely worse at hearing a brief tone they were expecting, showing that vision and hearing draw on a shared attentional capacity.
- Long COVID patients react ~3 SD slower on a 30-second test
270 post-COVID condition patients at UK and German clinics showed severe psychomotor slowing on simple and vigilance tasks versus controls, largely independent of depression, fatigue questionnaires, or sleep.
- How different types of memory load affect visual distraction
While loading mental control processes makes us more easily distracted, loading visual memory actually helps us block out irrelevant sights.
- Does mind-wandering help people solve social problems?
People whose minds wandered more generated more steps when solving everyday social problems, but their solutions were judged less effective.
- How does the brain of a gaming addict react to game words?
Gamers with Internet Gaming Disorder show higher activation in brain areas linked to cognitive control and vision when seeing gaming terms, even though their button-press response times do not significantly differ from non-gamers.
- Does Mind-Body Exercise Help Attention in Older Adults?
Baduanjin mind-body exercise improved selective attention in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, but this improvement was not clearly linked to changes in brain network connections.
- Does Practice Mask Brain Stimulation Benefits in ADHD?
Practice-induced learning on an attention task masked most of the potential benefits of brain stimulation, though the stimulation still successfully reduced hyperactivity in adults with ADHD.
- Does learning a second language late still boost auditory attention?
Bilinguals show better auditory selective attention and mental switching than monolinguals, even if they learned their second language as teenagers.
- How does the brain process different types of mental conflict?
The brain uses distinct prefrontal and parietal networks to process different types of cognitive conflict without relying on the anterior cingulate cortex when tasks are grouped.
- Does reward capture our attention even when we are focused?
Visual cues linked to high cash payouts automatically pull our attention away, even when we have already focused our minds on a different spot.
- Does a brief burst of classroom exercise boost kids' attention?
A brief 12-minute classroom exercise session does not improve attention or mental processing speed in young adolescents compared to sitting quietly.
- Do children with obesity shift visual attention less efficiently?
Children with obesity were much slower than healthy-weight peers when a cue pointed the wrong way, and their brain responses to targets were smaller.
- Can mindfulness protect jailed teens' attention under stress?
Attention got worse over months in jail for all detained teenagers, but those given mindfulness-based training declined less, especially if they also practised on their own.
- Do green schoolyards help kids focus after recess?
Spending recess in a natural school garden instead of a concrete courtyard improves children's attention and working memory.
- Does Kindergarten Yoga Improve Attention and Behavior?
Yoga sessions held twice a week improved young children's visual attention, hand-eye coordination, and classroom behavior compared to regular physical activities or free play.
- How Our Brains Warp Visual Details Based on What We Learn
Our brain's visual regions warp how they represent objects to match the specific features we pay attention to when learning categories, reflecting our individual thinking strategies.
- Do we look at what matters, or at what stands out?
Objects that people consider important in a scene are looked at more and more centrally, and boosting an object's contrast draws the eyes to it without changing that underlying importance effect.
- How past visual searches affect our future focus
Repetitive exposure to a target color speeds up search times over the long run, but only when we search for a combination of features rather than a single distinct color.
- Do children's brains pick out targets in a search like adults'?
Children aged 9 to 12 showed the same brain signature of selecting a target among distractors as adults, just larger and slightly later.
- Why do extra items on screen reduce distraction?
Adding neutral items to a display only weakened a distractor's interference when those items were within the spread of attention, were real letters like the target, and could not be filtered out by knowing the target's colour.
- Do busy, cluttered scenes make eyewitnesses less reliable?
Witnesses to a crime or crash in a visually cluttered scene remembered peripheral details far worse and were more easily swayed by leading questions, yet usually felt about as confident.
- Do kids who keep the beat in music class pay better attention?
Children who played more precisely in time with their teacher in a group music class were rated by their teachers as more attentive and showed steadier performance on a computer attention task.
- Does stress affect attention differently in men and women?
Academic stress slows down deliberate attention in men, but only slows down automatic attention in women who also show high physical stress responses.
- Do we unconsciously learn to ignore a frequent distractor colour?
People learned to ignore a distractor in its most frequent colour, but the effect was small and short-lived, and noticing the pattern actually made it weaker.
- Is mindfulness training in nature as effective as standard training?
Mindfulness training practiced in a supportive natural setting is just as effective at reducing stress and improving focus as conventional indoor training but requires less effort.
- How different types of direction signs guide our attention
Simple arrows and words rapidly shift our visual attention to a cued location, but complex real-world map scenes fail to do so.
- How aging affects how we ignore visual locations and objects
While older adults struggle to ignore recently visited moving objects, they can ignore stationary objects just as well as younger adults when given enough time.