Were you Paying Attention?

But did you see the moon walking bear?
This is an awareness test I remember viewing many years ago and I was stumped that I didn’t notice what was actually going on in the video. This was a campaign  to look out for cyclists on the road but I found it interesting how if you are not giving your full attention to everything that is going on, then you can easily miss important features or components. This idea isn’t just portrayed through the video, but in everyday life, through University work, signs on the road videos etc. The reason I did not see the bear in the video was because I was not paying attention to it, but rather, focussed on the other components of the video.

Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one thing while ignoring other things.

To test attention, I designed a test to see if there was any difference between my sisters attention capacity and mine through remembering exercises. I used a ‘random generator’ site that displays randomly selected ideas according to that category. I used 3 categories in total, the first was sport, the next was countries and the last was movie titles. I set the settings to display 20 different things under each specific category and we did this three times. I made my sister and I first view the different components in the categories for 1 minute, then straight away we would use our memory and have one minute to write down what we remember. For example the first category included sports such as soccer, competitive swimming, roller derby (All randomly generated) and the movie category included Titanic, Focus, Monsters Inc University, Grease etc.

This ethnographic research was used to examine the attention that my sister had, retrospective to mine. We both enjoyed doing this task as we saw it as a competition to see who could remember the most. I thought that the different categories would result in significantly different outcomes. By this I am referring to the knowledge of the categories e.g. I think that my knowledge of movies is greater than my sister but I believe her knowledge of sports is greater than mine. But I did notice that if there was something that we were not familiar with e.g. I did not know the movie ‘Doir and I’, then it wasn’t something that we remembered easily. Some of the results I was surprised by as I just couldn’t remember any more than 11 of the 20 possible outcomes. An article in The Telegraph has suggest that our attention span has shortened due to smartphones which could be true as my sister and I are both frequent smartphones users and we struggles to remember what we had seen.

There was a study that was conducted to analyse the attention of students and one of the core components that was assessed was analysing the students own individual attention. They were asked  ‘I find it hard to stay focussed when…’ and some of the results were ‘, when I am tired’, ‘When I was hungry or after eating a big meal’ etc. These are all factors that contribute to the ability to pay attention. I know when I was doing to own study with my sister, I hadn’t had lunch yet and this could have impacted my ability to concentrate.

References

Hovington, C & Ashgar, A & Sharp, S & Nalbantoglu, J 2015, How Does M Brain Pay Attention?, Science and Children, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 45-53.

Watson, L 2015, ‘Humans have shorter attention span than goldfish, thanks to smartphones’, The, Telegraph, 15 May, viewed 20 September 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11607315/Humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smartphones.html