It is a truism to say that intelligence and happiness depend almost exclusively on what we choose to pay attention to. However, this is much easier said than done. The individual and collective attention of teachers is often drawn in many different directions. Paying attention to what is truly important is becoming more and more…

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to…

Attentional interference between tasks performed in parallel is known to have strong and often undesired effects. As yet, however, the mechanisms by which interference operates remain elusive. A better knowledge of these processes may facilitate our understanding of the effects of attention on human performance and the debilitating consequences…

Effects of a spatial cue on representational momentum were examined. If a cue was present during or after target motion and indicated the location at which the target would vanish or had vanished, forward displacement of that target decreased. The decrease in forward displacement was larger when cues were present after target motion than when cues…

E. Dhooge and R. J. Hartsuiker (2010) reported experiments showing that picture naming takes longer with low- than high-frequency distractor words, replicating M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (2003). In addition, they showed that this distractor-frequency effect disappears when distractors are masked or preexposed. These findings were taken to refute…

"Continuous partial attention" is a term that was coined in the late 1990s, to describe the increasingly dispersed nature of attention in online environments. The purpose of this article is to describe the concept, discuss its implications for online learning, and propose a new agenda for research in what has been called "the Age of Interruption."

As a college mathematics teacher for six years, the author has learned his share of pedagogical techniques through research, practice, and reflection. He adopts new theories into classroom practice, differentiates instruction when necessary, and remains open to the diversity his students bring with respect to academic readiness, cultural norms,…

Recent studies have shown that the learner's focus of attention is an important factor that influences motor skill learning. Furthermore, the ability to concentrate has been deemed one of the most important keys to effective sport performance and is essential to performing one's best. Other experts have concluded that concentration is indeed a…

A forced-choice reaction-time (RT) task was used to examine voluntary visual orienting among children and adolescents with trisomy 21 Down syndrome and typically developing children matched at an MA of approximately 5.6 years, an age when the development of orienting abilities reaches optimal adult-like efficiency. Both groups displayed faster…