SELECTIVE ATTENTION, DIVIDED ATTENTION AND SPACING EFFECT

SELECTIVE ATTENTION, DIVIDED ATTENTION AND SPACING EFFECT

Human beings are exposed to different sensory information at any instant of their existence. However, they do not have to pay attention to all of them. Selective attention refers to the practice of focusing on a specific aspect of the environment for a specified period (Krauzlis et al., 2018). Because attention is usually rarely limited in nature, selective attention requires that individual rules out other unimportant issues to focus on ones that are of greater importance. However, selective attention could be different from one individual to another. The reason behind this is that what seems important to one person will be less critical to the other person. The aspect of importance is relative to an individual’s opinion. It is worth to note that selective attention is different from inattentional blindness. In inattentional blindness, an individual focuses so hard on one subject that they fail to notice other things that enter into their visual field. The difference is that selective attention does not prevent a person from noticing unexpected things that get into their sight field. An example of selective attention is a group of a friend having a party in a busy restaurant. There is much sensory information from waitresses, a different conversation, some kind of music and many others. However, the group of friends concentrate on their subject and ignore everything else taking place in the restaurant.

There are a few instances when a person is required to take care of two or more subjects simultaneously. Divided attention is an advanced human characteristic. It is the ability to multitask two or more things at the same time (Salo et al., 2017). However, in such a circumstanced, the performance of one of the several tasks is compromised. This is usually a proof for the limited ability of human beings to process information. Research work reports that there is a connection between divided attention and reading difficulties and deficiencies. An example of divided attention is a student who is required to write a story. The student must think of the characters, the story plot, writing style and at the same time, take note of time, spelling and pronunciation of the words. The best thing about divided attention is that it can be improved through repeated practice. Continuous practice of a set of tasks improves the multitasking ability of an individual.

There is a finding from research that human long-term memory improves when learning activities are spread over spaced time intervals. This phenomenon is referred to as the Spacing effect (Delaney et al., 2018). It proves to be among the most robust and replicable conclusion from psychological research programs. The research for spacing effect involves testing human memory by presenting learners with a list of words over two schedules. In one plan, the schedules are massed, and in the other, they are spaced. After some time, the learners are asked to recap the words they learned. Consistent results prove that the learners who took the exercise in spaced schedules performed better than the ones who took the exercise in massed schedules. The effects of spacing effect can be visible at various ages of a person. They can be observed at infancy, childhood, adulthood and even at old age. The spacing effect is perceived as the index of basic memory principles. Further research proves that spacing effect is not only limited to memory for particular things, but it addresses a much broader learning effect.

References

Krauzlis, R. J., Bogadhi, A. R., Herman, J. P., & Bollimunta, A. (2018). Selective attention without a neocortex. Cortex, 102, 161-175.

Salo, E., Salmela, V., Salmi, J., Numminen, J., & Alho, K. (2017). Brain activity associated with selective attention divided attention and distraction. Brain Research, 1664, 25-36.

Delaney, P. F., Godbole, N. R., Holden, L. R., & Chang, Y. (2018). Working memory capacity and the spacing effect in cued recall. Memory, 26(6), 784-797.