Attention management

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A person's attention set on their computer screen.

Attention management refers to models and tools for supporting the management of attention at the individual or at the collective level (cf. attention economy), and at the short-term (quasi real time) or at a longer term (over periods of weeks or months).

Contents

The ability to control distractions and stay focused is essential to produce higher quality results. A research conducted by Stanford [1] shows that single-tasking is more effective and productive than multi-tasking. [2] Different studies have been conducted in using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for supporting attention, and in particular, models have been elaborated for supporting attention. [3] [4] [5]

Background

The scarcity of attention is the underlying assumption for attention management; the researcher Herbert A. Simon pointed out that when there is a vast availability of information, attention becomes the more scarce resource as human beings cannot digest all the information. [6]

Fundamentally, attention is limited by the processing power of the brain. Applying information theory, estimates from Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and engineer Robert Lucky expect the processing capacity of the human conscious mind to be around 120 bits per second; listening to a person speak requires about 60 bits per second of processing; this implies you can barely comprehend two people speaking at the same time. [7] [8] According to German physiologist Manfred Zimmermann, the human sensory system can pick up information at a much higher rate: he estimates a channel capacity of 10 million bits/s for the eyes alone, 1 million bits/s for the skin, and 100,000 bits/s for the aural channel while conscious perception can cover only a small fraction of this. [9] Consequently, the brain needs to employ mental filters to determine the most important information needing to be processed. Most of these filtering processes happen automatically and beyond conscious awareness. [7] Limitations of attention capacities are revealed in many contexts, for example when speaking on a telephone while driving. The resulting high-frequency switching between processing of visual and auditory input is proven to constrict recognition of important information; driver's reactions to cars braking in front of them are affected, so is recollection of roadside billboards. [10] [11]

Attention is also limited by the resources available to the neurons in the brain that enable humans to maintain focus as all processed information contributes to mental fatigue. Estimates suggest that the daily information input of an American in 2011 was five times as high as that in 1986. [7] Therefore, according to Maura Thomas, attention management is the most important skill for the 21st century. With digital revolution and the advent of internet and communication devices, time management is no longer enough to guarantee a good quality of work. Allocating time to perform one activity does not mean that it will receive attention if constant interruptions and distractions come across. Therefore, people should stop worrying about time management and focus on attention management. [12]

Beside the implications on work and productivity, attention management can also be applied with regard to other areas such as happiness. British behavioral scientist Paul Dolan identifies the allocation of attention as a key component in improving personal well-being. Life events only affect the individual to the extent he or she is attending to it; illnesses are perceived as worse if they are more salient and repeatedly expose a person to new negative stimuli. Consequently, managing attention and focusing on things that make the individual happy is one of Dolan's approaches towards greater happiness. [13]

Attention problems

Supporting the management of attention the objective is to bring a certain number of solutions to attention problems. A selection of these problems are:

Applications

Distracting from pain

Attention management can play a key role in helping people manage pain by focusing their attention elsewhere while experiencing acute pain. However, this must be done strategically, as the most important factor in being a good distractor seems to be that the activity is engaging and interesting for an individual. This changes on a case-by-case basis and must be tailored to the patient. For example, if a person routinely struggles with reading and it routinely disinterests them, giving that person a book would not be a good distractor for when they are suffering from pain. [19] According to a study by Jameson, Trevena, and Swain, participants who were subjected to pain by submerging one of their hands into ice-cold water were able to deal with the pain longer, reported less pain, and less anxiety when they were playing video games than if they were watching television or doing nothing. [20] This study helps the assertion that participating in something engaging and interesting will help to distract from a painful or uncomfortable stimulus.

Mindfulness training

Mindfulness training can be helpful in attention management. Made famous in the 1970s by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-based stress reduction. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is an intense program of training to help students understand and regulate emotions and patterns of behavior. This kind of training is helpful for people to be more aware of what they are focusing on. According to a study by Jensen, Vangkilde, Frokjaer, and Hasselbalch, mindfulness training is much more effective at reducing stress than nonmindfulness training, i.e. relaxation training. The study also found that those who had participated in mindfulness-training tended to perform better at attentional tasks. [21] Thus, mindfulness training may have a positive effect on attention management.

Strategies

Tools can be designed for supporting attention

These tools are often adaptive hypermedia, and often rely on profiling the user [4] in order determine how to better support people's attention.

Research distinguishes between autonomous reactions to sensory stimuli (stimulus-driven) and deliberate direction of attention (goal-driven). [27] Correspondingly, attention management can focus on the alteration of external and internal factors. [28]

External factors

Attention management strategies commonly include the minimization of interruptions as a variety of evidence suggests that eliminating distractions increases productivity. For example, a series of studies has demonstrated that productivity at the workplace is generally higher on days with bad weather due to the absence of distracting thoughts about outdoor activities experienced in good weather. [29] Diverted attention can result in reduced performance and stress; research has shown that interruption can cause higher completion time, double task error rate as well as increase the annoyance of the individual. Interruptions are also proven to contribute to higher anxiety. [30] [31]

Notifications from electronic devices are some of the most common external stimuli causing distraction and studies indicate that social pressure frequently leads to immediate handling of these interruptions. Thus, attention management is considered a field of rising importance in ubiquitous computing and application design. Digital attention management systems utilizing machine learning recognize phases in which interruptions are counterproductive for the user and delay notifications. [30]

Besides utilizing digital systems, strategies minimizing interruptions and irrelevant information can also incorporate human resources in form of secretaries, consultants and other assisting employees; this is common practice observable in higher executive levels of companies and in politics. [7]

Internal factors

A goal of attention management is to reach the highest level of unobstructed attention and focus, at state widely referred to as flow. The term, coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes a state of full involvement in a task, essentially a level of absorption where the individual forgets about everything but the current activity, even their own existence; all conscious processing capacity is devoted to the task. Characteristic for that state is the underlying intrinsic motivation; staying focused seemingly does not require any additional energy and one experiences motivation to pursue the activity purely for the sake of the activity itself. [8]

Correspondingly, psychologist Adam Grant views inducing motivation as an integral part of attention management. In his eyes, focus on the essential information can be supported by finding the underlying motivation and discovering fascination and meaning in the task at hand. [32]

Projects

A certain number of projects have been conducted to investigate how to use ICT to support attention such as:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attention</span> Psychological focus, perception and prioritising discrete information

Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in terms of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, less than 1% of the visual input data stream of 1MByte/sec can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness.

Information overload is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information. The term "information overload" was first used as early as 1962 by scholars in management and information studies, including in Bertram Gross' 1964 book, The Managing of Organizations, and was further popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. Speier et al. (1999) said that if input exceeds the processing capacity, information overload occurs, which is likely to reduce the quality of the decisions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flow (psychology)</span> Full immersion in an activity

Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being inthe zone or locked in, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. Flow is the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is. It requires a high level of concentration. Flow is used as a coping skill for stress and anxiety when productively pursuing a form of leisure that matches one's skill set.

Distraction is the process of diverting the attention of an individual or group from a desired area of focus and thereby blocking or diminishing the reception of desired information. Distraction is caused by: the lack of ability to pay attention; lack of interest in the object of attention; or the great intensity, novelty or attractiveness of something other than the object of attention. Distractions come from both external sources, and internal sources. External distractions include factors such as visual triggers, social interactions, music, text messages, and phone calls. There are also internal distractions such as hunger, fatigue, illness, worrying, and daydreaming. Both external and internal distractions contribute to the interference of focus.

Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the understanding of an environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors. Situational awareness is important for effective decision making in many environments. It is formally defined as:

“the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future”.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Media multitasking</span> Concurrent use of multiple media streams

Media multitasking is the concurrent use of multiple digital media streams. Media multitasking has been associated with depressive symptoms and social anxiety by a study involving 318 participants. A 2018 review found that while the literature is sparse and inconclusive, people who do a heavy amount of media multitasking have worse performance in several cognitive domains. One of the authors commented that while the data does not "unambiguously show that media multitasking causes a change in attention and memory," media multitasking is an inefficient practice that requires "task switching" costs including "limitations in auditory and visual processing".

Linda Stone, a tech writer and consultant, coined the term continuous partial attention in 1998 to describe a modern adaptive behavior of continuously dividing one's attention. Stone has clarified that continuous partial attention is not the same as multitasking. Where multitasking is driven by a conscious desire to be productive and efficient, CPA is an automatic process motivated only by "a desire to be a live node on the network" or by the willingness to connect and stay connected, scanning and optimizing opportunities, activities and contacts in an effort to not miss anything that is going on.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an approach to psychotherapy that uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) methods in conjunction with mindfulness meditative practices and similar psychological strategies. The origins to its conception and creation can be traced back to the traditional approaches from East Asian formative and functional medicine, philosophy and spirituality, birthed from the basic underlying tenets from classical Taoist, Buddhist and Traditional Chinese medical texts, doctrine and teachings.

In the field of psychology, absent-mindedness is a mental state wherein a person is forgetfully inattentive. It is the opposite mental state of mindfulness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Effects of meditation</span> Surveys & evaluates various meditative practices & evidence of neurophysiological benefits

The psychological and physiological effects of meditation have been studied. In recent years, studies of meditation have increasingly involved the use of modern instruments, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, which are able to observe brain physiology and neural activity in living subjects, either during the act of meditation itself or before and after meditation. Correlations can thus be established between meditative practices and brain structure or function.

In psychology, self-compassion is extending compassion to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. American psychologist Kristin Neff has defined self-compassion as being composed of three main elements – self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human multitasking</span> Ability to perform activities simultaneously

Human multitasking is the concept that one can split their attention on more than one task or activity at the same time, such as speaking on the phone while driving a car.

Interruption science is the interdisciplinary scientific study concerned with how interruptions affect human performance, and the development of interventions to ameliorate the disruption caused by interruptions. Interruption science is a branch of human factors psychology and emerged from human–computer interaction and cognitive psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attentional control</span> Individuals capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore

Attentional control, colloquially referred to as concentration, refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms, attentional control can be described as an individual's ability to concentrate. Primarily mediated by the frontal areas of the brain including the anterior cingulate cortex, attentional control and attentional shifting are thought to be closely related to other executive functions such as working memory.

Multi-communicating is the act of managing multiple conversations simultaneously. The term was coined by Reinsch, Turner, and Tinsley, who proposed that simultaneous conversations can be conducted using an array of media, including face-to-face, phone, and email tools for communication. The practice allows individuals to utilize two or more technologies to interact with each other.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ergonomics</span> Designing systems to suit their users

Ergonomics, also known as human factors or human factors engineering (HFE), is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Primary goals of human factors engineering are to reduce human error, increase productivity and system availability, and enhance safety, health and comfort with a specific focus on the interaction between the human and equipment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mechanisms of mindfulness meditation</span>

Mindfulness has been defined in modern psychological terms as "paying attention to relevant aspects of experience in a nonjudgmental manner", and maintaining attention on present moment experience with an attitude of openness and acceptance. Meditation is a platform used to achieve mindfulness. Both practices, mindfulness and meditation, have been "directly inspired from the Buddhist tradition" and have been widely promoted by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to have a positive impact on several psychiatric problems such as depression and therefore has formed the basis of mindfulness programs such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based pain management. The applications of mindfulness meditation are well established, however the mechanisms that underlie this practice are yet to be fully understood. Many tests and studies on soldiers with PTSD have shown tremendous positive results in decreasing stress levels and being able to cope with problems of the past, paving the way for more tests and studies to normalize and accept mindful based meditation and research, not only for soldiers with PTSD, but numerous mental inabilities or disabilities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Automotive head-up display</span> Advanced driver assistance system

An automotive head-up display or automotive heads-up display — also known as an auto-HUD — is any transparent display that presents data in the automobile without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints. The origin of the name stems from a pilot being able to view information with the head positioned "up" and looking forward, instead of angled down looking at lower instruments. At this time, there are three different approaches to OEM HUDs in automobiles. The first is to treat the back of the windshield in such a way that an image projected onto it will reflect to the driver. The second is to have a small combiner that is separate from the windshield. Combiners can be retracted. The third is to laminate a transparent display in between layers of the windshield glass.

Mindfulness and technology is a movement in research and design, that encourages the user to become aware of the present moment, rather than losing oneself in a technological device. This field encompasses multidisciplinary participation between design, psychology, computer science, and religion. Mindfulness stems from Buddhist meditation practices and refers to the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment, and in a non-judgmental mindset. In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, research is being done on Techno-spirituality — the study of how technology can facilitate feelings of awe, wonder, transcendence, and mindfulness and on Slow design, which facilitates self-reflection. The excessive use of personal devices, such as smartphones and laptops, can lead to the deterioration of mental and physical health. This area focuses on redesigning and creating technology to improve the wellbeing of its users.

Embodied writing practices are used by academics and artists to highlight the connection between writing and the body, bring consciousness to the cultural implications of academic writing, and inform an understanding of art forms as first person narrative. Embodied writing practices serve as a means to transcend the traditional boundaries of language and communication, inviting individuals to explore the intricate relationship between their physical experiences and the act of writing itself.

References

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  2. ↑ Thomas, Maura (2015). "Time Management Training Doesn't Work". Harvard Business Review.
  3. ↑ Davenport, Thomas H.; Völpel, Sven C. (September 2001). "The rise of knowledge towards attention management". Journal of Knowledge Management. 5 (3): 212–222. doi:10.1108/13673270110400816. ISSN   1367-3270.
  4. 1 2 Nabeth, Thierry (2008), Hildebrandt, Mireille; Gutwirth, Serge (eds.), "User Profiling for Attention Support at School and Work", Profiling the European Citizen, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 185–200, doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-6914-7_10, ISBN   978-1-4020-6913-0
  5. ↑ Bounfour, Ahmed (2009). Organisational capital : modelling, measuring and contextualising. London: Routledge. ISBN   978-0-415-43771-4. OCLC   176823681.
  6. ↑ The Economist profile on Herbert Simon (20th of march, 2009). Accessed May 13, 2017. http://www.economist.com/node/13350892
  7. 1 2 3 4 Levitin, Daniel J. (2015-09-23). "Why It's So Hard To Pay Attention, Explained By Science". Fast Company. Retrieved 2020-04-09.
  8. 1 2 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (23 October 2008), Flow, the secret to happiness , retrieved 2020-04-09
  9. ↑ Zimmermann, M. (1986), "Neurophysiology of Sensory Systems", Fundamentals of Sensory Physiology, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 68–116, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-82598-9_3, ISBN   978-3-540-15870-7
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  13. ↑ Dolan, Paul (2015). Happiness by design : change what you do, not how you think. Thorndike Press. ISBN   978-1-4104-7845-0. OCLC   899229105.
  14. ↑ ( Cowan 2001 )
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  22. ↑ Apostolou, Dimitris; Karapiperis, Stelios; Stojanovic, Nenad (2008), Tsihrintzis, George A.; Virvou, Maria; Howlett, Robert J.; Jain, Lakhmi C. (eds.), "On Managing Users' Attention in Knowledge-Intensive Organizations", New Directions in Intelligent Interactive Multimedia, Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol. 142, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 239–248, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-68127-4_25, ISBN   978-3-540-68127-4
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  29. ↑ Lee, Jooa Julia; Gino, Francesca; Staats, Bradley R. (2012). "Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity". The Journal of Applied Psychology. 99 (3): 504–13. doi:10.1037/e519682015-006. PMID   24417552.
  30. 1 2 Anderson, Christoph; Hübener, Isabel; Seipp, Ann-Kathrin; Ohly, Sandra; David, Klaus; Pejovic, Veljko (2018-07-05). "A Survey of Attention Management Systems in Ubiquitous Computing Environments". Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. 2 (2): 1–27. arXiv: 1806.06771 . doi:10.1145/3214261. ISSN   2474-9567. S2CID   49303616.
  31. ↑ Bailey, Brian P.; Konstan, Joseph A. (2006-07-01). "On the need for attention-aware systems: Measuring effects of interruption on task performance, error rate, and affective state". Computers in Human Behavior. Attention aware systems. 22 (4): 685–708. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2005.12.009. ISSN   0747-5632. S2CID   16424103.
  32. ↑ Grant, Adam (2019-03-28). "Productivity Isn't About Time Management. It's About Attention Management". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-04-09.
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