Attention

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the most important college learning skill
. . .paying attention.

You should learn:

1.

The Principle of Active Participation and the role of overt-covert attention.

2.

The difference between automatic attention and selective attention to critical cues.

3.

The Principle of Minimizing Work and the fact that selective attention takes effort.

4.

The proposition that selective attention is a learnable response.

5.

The notion that world knowledge is not verbal but that knowledge is learned from words.

6.

The way that knowledge increases from novice to expert.

When Mark Twain went out to the pasture to teach a mule the difference between "gee" and "haw" (that is, left and right), he began by giving the mule a friendly but solid whack on the rump with a two-by-four. When asked why he did this, he said, "The first thing you have to do to teach a mule anything is to get his attention." It is the same with people. If you are going to learn from this or any textbook, you will have to pay attention. So important is this rule that it can be stated as one of the basic... Principles of Verbal Learning:

Principle of Active Participation Overt/covert attention/rehearsal is
necessary for effective verbal learning.

Overt behavior is publicly observable; it is what a person does openly or says out loud. In contrast, covert behavior is private; only the behaving person is consciously aware of what s/he is thinking. For example, a person may show manifest signs of paying attention to a lecture, such as sitting up and looking at the speaker, but as you know, attending is really a covert act. We have all learned how to fake doing one thing while thinking about something else. You have probably had the experience of starting to turn a page only to realize that you don't remember anything that you just read. The Principle of Active Participation says that you will only learn from verbal material if you notice it, think about it, actively attend to it.

The Principle of Active Participation is more complicated than it appears at first reading. One complication is that there are two different processes controlling one's attention. (There are also two kinds of rehearsal, which are discussed in a later chapter.) One process is called automatic attention. As the name implies, automatic attention is not voluntary or deliberate. Any strong, unusual, or unexpected event tends automatically to command attention. This is the attention process that Mark Twain used, but people don't (usually) need to be hit with a two-by-four. You tend automatically to attend to the loudest sound in music, to the most vivid color in a picture, or to an insect that is biting you. Events in the external world act to control attention automatically.

The other process is called selective attention. It might better be called "intentional attention" because the process is voluntary and deliberate. For example, if I now ask you whether you are breathing by expanding your chest or your abdomen, you can quickly shift your attention from my words to your body and find out how you are breathing. The important point is that cues from your body are there all along but they are normally in the background rather than at the center of your attention. But you can voluntarily turn your attention to them on command.

In sum, you can only focus your attention on one thing at a time. Salient events in the environment tend automatically to attract attention, but you can selectively attend to less salient stimuli.