Quick Tricks And Tips To Improve Focus
1. Control your behavior resist the temptation to do things that lead to further distractions turn off email and other electronics.2. Pay attention to your attention when you feel yourself drifting, make a conscious effort to recover focus.3. Prioritize your work do your hardest tasks first and then turn to more interesting tasks, like checking email or phone messages.4. Enjoy the Mozart effect listen to a minuet by Mozart. A study showed it increases your ability to concentrate and complete a task, no matter how old you are.
today by looking at your nutrition. What you eat and the nutrients you take in are crucially important for focus and concentration.
Can you start today? Yes! Plan a healthy meal for tonights dinner, and sketch out tomorrows menu. Add in a comprehensive brain supplement with extra B vitamins and vitamin D. Look also for DHA, an essential fatty acid found in fish oil its well-known for its ability to support cognitive function. Other targeted ingredients can help protect the brain from inflammation, like curcumin from the spice turmeric. Our Memory Solutions contains all these ingredients, and more, and supports both healthy focus and memory.
Major Schools Of Thought
Psychologists generally consider biology the substrate of thought and feeling, and therefore an important area of study. Behaviorial neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, involves the application of biological principles to the study of physiological and genetic mechanisms underlying behavior in humans and other animals. The allied field of comparative psychology is the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals. A leading question in behavioral neuroscience has been whether and how mental functions are localized in the brain. From Phineas Gage to H.M. and Clive Wearing, individual people with mental deficits traceable to physical brain damage have inspired new discoveries in this area. Modern behavioral neuroscience could be said to originate in the 1870s, when in France Paul Broca traced production of speech to the left frontal gyrus, thereby also demonstrating hemispheric lateralization of brain function. Soon after, Carl Wernicke identified a related area necessary for the understanding of speech.
Exogenous And Endogenous Orienting
Orienting attention is vital and can be controlled through external or internal processes. However, comparing these two processes is challenging because external signals do not operate completely exogenously, but will only summon attention and eye movements if they are important to the subject.
Exogenous orienting is frequently described as being under control of a stimulus. Exogenous orienting is considered to be reflexive and automatic and is caused by a sudden change in the periphery. This often results in a reflexive saccade. Since exogenous cues are typically presented in the periphery, they are referred to as peripheral cues. Exogenous orienting can even be observed when individuals are aware that the cue will not relay reliable, accurate information about where a target is going to occur. This means that the mere presence of an exogenous cue will affect the response to other stimuli that are subsequently presented in the cue’s previous location.
When examining differences between exogenous and endogenous orienting, some researchers suggest that there are four differences between the two kinds of cues:
- exogenous orienting is less affected by cognitive load than endogenous orienting
- observers are able to ignore endogenous cues but not exogenous cues
- exogenous cues have bigger effects than endogenous cues and
- expectancies about cue validity and predictive value affects endogenous orienting more than exogenous orienting.
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Overt And Covert Orienting
Attention may be differentiated into “overt” versus “covert” orienting.
Overt orienting is the act of selectively attending to an item or location over others by moving the eyes to point in that direction. Overt orienting can be directly observed in the form of eye movements. Although overt eye movements are quite common, there is a distinction that can be made between two types of eye movements reflexive and controlled. Reflexive movements are commanded by the superior colliculus of the midbrain. These movements are fast and are activated by the sudden appearance of stimuli. In contrast, controlled eye movements are commanded by areas in the frontal lobe. These movements are slow and voluntary.
There are studies that suggest the mechanisms of overt and covert orienting may not be controlled separately and independently as previously believed. Central mechanisms that may control covert orienting, such as the parietal lobe, also receive input from subcortical centres involved in overt orienting. In support of this, general theories of attention actively assume bottom-up processes and top-down processes converge on a common neural architecture, in that they control both covert and overt attentional systems. For example, if individuals attend to the right hand corner field of view, movement of the eyes in that direction may have to be actively suppressed.
What Is Intrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation is a drive that comes purely from within its not due to any anticipated reward, deadline, or outside pressure. For example, people who are intrinsically motivated to run do so because they love the feeling of running itself, and it’s an important part of their identity. Extrinsic motivation can increase motivation in the short term, but over time it can wear down or even backfire. By contrast, intrinsic motivation is powerful because it is integrated into identity and serves as a continuous source of motivation.
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What Is Cognitive Psychology A Definition
While cognitive psychology is a popular branch of psychology today, it is actually a relatively young field of study. Until the 1950s, behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology. Between 1950 and 1970, the tide began to shift against behavioral psychology to focus on topics such as attention, memory, and problem-solving. Often referred to as the cognitive revolution, this period generated considerable research on subjects including processing models, cognitive research methods, and the first use of the term cognitive psychology.
The term cognitive psychology was first used in 1967 by American psychologist Ulric Neisser in his book Cognitive Psychology. According to Neisser, cognition involves all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. Neisser also suggested that given such a broad and sweeping definition, cognition was involved in anything and everything that people do.
Essentially, all psychological events are cognitive events. Today, the American Psychological Association defines cognitive psychology as the study of higher mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, and thinking.
The Twentieth Century: Locating Attention At A Bottleneck In Information Processing
The variety among the deflationary explanatory approaches thatcharacterized the theories of attention offered in the nineteenthcentury gave way in the early twentieth century to a period in whichone such explanatory tactic was dominant: the tactic of behaviourism.Behaviourists tended to neglect attention, but did not ignore itentirely. John Dashiells 1928 Fundamentals of ObjectivePsychology, for example, is a behaviourist work that attempts toaccount for attention as a form of posturing . The project of identifying a behaviour with which to explainattention was, nonetheless, an understandably unpopular one. AsGilbert Ryle notes, it is not only attention, but also heedconcepts more generally, that resist simple behaviouristanalysis:
hen a man is described as driving carefully, whistling withconcentration or eating absent-mindedly the special character of hisactivity seem to elude the observer, the camera and the Dictaphone.Perhaps knitted brows, taciturnity and fixed gaze may be evidence ofintentness but these can be simulated, or they can be purelyhabitual.
In the middle of the twentieth century behaviourisms dominancewaned, cognitive psychology established itself, and a new theoreticalapproach to the explanation of attention was developed. These threedevelopments were intimately related to one another. Instrumental toall three was the publication in 1958 of Donald BroadbentsPerception and Communication.
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Will Meditation Improve My Focus
Mindfulness training can help people stay calmer and more focused when their mind wanders. With greater mindfulness, many individuals find it easier to accept and sit with negative thoughts, develop greater personal awareness, and sustain attention. There is mixed evidence, however, on whether meditation is any more effective at heightening focus than other mindfulness techniques.
Theories Of Selective Attention
By Dr. Saul McLeod, updated updated 2018
We are constantly bombarded by an endless array of internal and external stimuli, thoughts, and emotions. Given this abundance of available data, it is amazing that we make sense of anything!
In varying degrees of efficiency, we have developed the ability to focus on what is important while blocking out the rest.
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Psychology In Everyday Life: How To Effectively Learn And Remember
One way that the findings of psychological research may be particularly helpful to you is in terms of improving your learning and study skills. Psychological research has provided a substantial amount of knowledge about the principles of learning and memory. This information can help you do better in this and other courses, and can also help you better learn new concepts and techniques in other areas of your life. The most important thing you can learn in college is how to better study, learn, and remember. These skills will help you throughout your life, as you learn new jobs and take on other responsibilities. There are substantial individual differences in learning and memory, such that some people learn faster than others. But even if it takes you longer to learn than you think it should, the extra time you put into studying is well worth the effort. And you can learn to learnlearning to study effectively and to remember information is just like learning any other skill, such as playing a sport or a video game.
What Is The Importance Of Attention In Psychology And Life
Importance of Attention In Psychology is being discussed in this article.When you care about something you are giving it energy The relationship between the attentive style and the performance is simply the ability of focus.Regarding selectivity , these are the components of the attention being taken:
- focused attention , that is, the ability to select only the important stimuli for a particular task, ignoring the distracting ones
- devoted attention , that is, the ability to deploy your own careful resources between two or more tasks to be performed simultaneously.
- Alternative attention , which concerns the ability to perform multiple tasks by shifting their attentive resources from one task to the next, alternately, in order to perform multiple tasks in parallel.
WHEN we strive to pay attention to something which we deem important, we should realize that the mind is apt to turn its powers in the direction of certain objects, ideas, or thoughts which somehow have the power to interest it. Mind itself is a kind of attention, and like a stream follows certain channels.
In an old curiosity shop, the artist notices the pictures the soldier, the old weapon the student, the book a woman, the old costume. What we have in us by nature or training thus comes forth to greet its kind in the objects about us. Our attention is guided by our general interest.
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The Role Of The Unconscious
Freuds theory of psychoanalysis holds two major assumptions: that much of mental life is unconscious , and that past experiences, especially in early childhood, shape how a person feels and behaves throughout life. The concept of the unconscious was central: Freud postulated a cycle in which ideas are repressed but continue to operate unconsciously in the mind, and then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances. Much of Freuds theory was based on his investigations of patients suffering from hysteria and neurosis. Hysteria was an ancient diagnosis that was primarily used for women with a wide variety of symptoms, including physical symptoms and emotional disturbances with no apparent physical cause. The history of the term can be traced to ancient Greece, where the idea emerged that a womans uterus could float around her body and cause a variety of disturbances. Freud theorized instead that many of his patients problems arose from the unconscious mind. In Freuds view, the unconscious mind was a repository of feelings and urges of which we have no awareness.
Phenomenology In Contemporary Consciousness Theory
Phenomenological issues, by any other name, have played a prominentrole in very recent philosophy of mind. Amplifying the theme of theprevious section, we note two such issues: the form of inner awarenessthat ostensibly makes a mental activity conscious, and the phenomenalcharacter of conscious cognitive mental activity in thought, andperception, and action.
Ever since Nagels 1974 article, What Is It Like to be a Bat?, thenotion of what-it-is-like to experience a mental state or activity hasposed a challenge to reductive materialism and functionalism in theoryof mind. This subjective phenomenal character of consciousness is heldto be constitutive or definitive of consciousness. What is the form ofthat phenomenal character we find in consciousness?
A prominent line of analysis holds that the phenomenal character ofa mental activity consists in a certain form of awareness of thatactivity, an awareness that by definition renders it conscious. Sincethe 1980s a variety of models of that awareness have been developed. Asnoted above, there are models that define this awareness as ahigher-order monitoring, either an inner perception of the activity or inner consciousness , oran inner thought about the activity. A further model analyzes suchawareness as an integral part of the experience, a form ofself-representation within the experience. .)
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History Of The Concept
Reinforcement is closely linked to evolutionary principles, in that it represents adaptive functioning with obvious survival implications, and applies to all species capable of benefitting from experience. Its origin as a formal principle of modern psychology derives from Thorndike’s Law of Effect: the occurrence of a satisfying event stamps in the behavior that was instrumental in producing it. Hull’s influential learning theory proposed that the increase is in the strength of the association between a prior stimulus and the response, with the mechanism underlying reinforcement being the reduction in a basic biological drive. However, many stimuli can serve as reinforcers when they have only incentive value .
Much past research has been devoted to the question of whether reinforcement is necessary for learning to occur the present consensus is that it is not. The question, however, may be a spurious one, since it is difficult to imagine a behavior that has no consequences, and the positive nature of the outcome might be as simple as reducing constraints on the individual, or predicting future pleasures.
W. Schönpflug, in, 2001
Attention In Social Contexts
Social attention is one special form of attention that involves the allocation of limited processing resources in a social context. Previous studies on social attention often regard how attention is directed toward socially relevant stimuli such as faces and gaze directions of other individuals. In contrast to attending-to-others, a different line of researches has shown that self-related information such as own face and name automatically captures attention and is preferentially processed comparing to other-related information. These contrasting effects between attending-to-others and attending-to-self prompt a synthetic view in a recent Opinion article proposing that social attention operates at two polarizing states: In one extreme, individual tends to attend to the self and prioritize self-related information over others’, and, in the other extreme, attention is allocated to other individuals to infer their intentions and desires. Attending-to-self and attending-to-others mark the two ends of an otherwise continuum spectrum of social attention. For a given behavioral context, the mechanisms underlying these two polarities might interact and compete with each other in order to determine a saliency map of social attention that guides our behaviors. An imbalanced competition between these two behavioral and cognitive processes will cause cognitive disorders and neurological symptoms such as autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome.
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Free Nerve Endings Embedded In The Skin That Allow Humans To Perceive The Various Differences In Our Immediate Environment Adapted From Pinel 2009
The sensitivity of a given sensory system to the relevant stimuli can be expressed as an absolute threshold. Absolute threshold refers to the minimum amount of stimulus energy that must be present for the stimulus to be detected 50% of the time. Another way to think about this is by asking how dim can a light be or how soft can a sound be and still be detected half of the time. The sensitivity of our sensory receptors can be quite amazing. It has been estimated that on a clear night, the most sensitive sensory cells in the back of the eye can detect a candle flame 30 miles away . Under quiet conditions, the hair cells can detect the tick of a clock 20 feet away . Additionally, one teaspoon of sugar can be tasted within two gallons of water, and the human olfactory system can detect the scent of one drop of perfume throughout a six room apartment.
Webers Law: Each of the various senses has its own constant ratios determining difference thresholds.
Webers ideas about difference thresholds influenced concepts of signal detection theory which state that our abilities to detect a stimulus depends on sensory factors as well as our psychological state . Human factors engineers who design control consoles for planes and cars use signal detection theory all the time in order to asses situations pilots or drivers may experience such as difficulty in seeing and interpreting controls on extremely bright days.
How Does Sleep Affect Attention
A key to maintaining focus is the ability to recover attention quickly after a distraction. Research shows that people who get less sleep find it much more difficult to rebound from distraction, to complete tasks, and to finish jobs without mistakes. And in the case of driving, when focus is absolutely essential, insufficient rest leads to a higher accident rate.
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