2.  What can learning about ‘attention’ teach us about how we learn?  How can we connect our learning about ‘attention’ to our experiences to gain a better understanding of ourselves as learners?  Based on our understanding of ‘attention’ and ourselves as learners, what strategies can we adopt to help us with the process of learning?

3. 1.What do you think you know about focus and attention? 2.What questions or puzzles do you have? 3.What does the topic make you want to explore?

4. “What we choose to attend to and what we choose to ignore defines our subjective experience of the world” William James

5. Attention is concerned with resources and their limitations.  At any given time, people have a certain amount of mental energy to devote to all the possible tasks and all the incoming information.  If we devote portion of resources to one task, less is available to others.  The more complex and unfamiliar the task, the more mental resources must be allocated to that task.

6.  Selective attention: we choose to attend to some stimuli and ignore others. The concentrated focus of attention on particular stimuli saves our attentional energy.  Divided attention: we allocate our available attentional resources to coordinate performances on more than one task at a time

7.  Professor Daniel Simon’s Experiment  You will see two teams of basketball players. One wearing white shirts and one wearing black shirts. Count the total number of time the white team passes the ball.  Then, I will ask you the result and we will see how many people are right.

9. http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker /download/index.html  Flicker Paradigm Sequence is repeated 60s or until participant detects change

10.  We often manage to engage in more than one task at a time and we shift our attentional resources to allocate then as needed.  Example: experienced drivers easily can talk while driving under most circumstances, but they can quickly shift all their attention from talking and toward driving…  Question: how difficult is it to do 2 or more tasks at once ? => Dual-task performance

11. A dual task performance in the real world.  Using cell phones while driving is believed to be a major cause in 50% of highway accidents.  The argument is: talking on a cell phone distracts the driver’s attention from navigating the vehicle on the road

12. The brain cannot multitask:  Studies have shown that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to complete a task and makes up 50% more errors.

13. Emotions get our attention: used in advertising.  What’s going on in these adverts?  What do you see that makes you say that?

16.  Meaning before detail: Emotional arousal focuses attention on the “gist” of an experience at the expense of peripheral details. Which word was not part of the list?  Sleep  Red  Yawn

17.  The most common mistake in communication: relay too much information, with not enough time to connect the dots!  Can you think of an example of that?

18.  One way to measure attention is to use reaction times!  STROOP TESTS

21. Finding your best friend at a concert is hard

26.  The brain has a persistent interest in novelty.  An environment that contains mostly predictable stimuli lowers the brain’s interest

27.  Humor  Movement – get the blood flowing  Multi-sensory – interesting colorful visuals - & talk about learning  Quiz Games – help you rehearse – add repetitions for long term memory  Music

28.  Short study sessions, each segment on a single core concept – GIST  Big picture first, detail to be filled in later  40% improvement in understanding!  Plan of study, highlighting links between items

29.  The brain’s attentional “spotlight” can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking!  We are better at seeing patterns and the gist of an event than at recording detail.  Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.  Use narratives and create emotional events to hold other’s and your own attention!