This activity challenges students to establish media usage rules for a 30-day digital declutter, during which time they challenge themselves to disengage from distracting digital media. Students write self-assessments about their media habits and relationship to media before beginning the declutter and after they have finished the 30-day…

This article describes "seductive details" as attention-grabbing, irrelevant pieces of information. They can be words, illustrations, photographs, animations, narrations, videos, or sounds. Studying the effects of seductive details is a growing area of research--but it is far enough along to merit teachers' interest: there are over 20…

Shared book reading is defined as the interactive process of engaging children with text and illustrations. Through shared book reading, children learn to enjoy the reading process and appreciate different genres of literature, such as story books, alphabet books, and rhyming books. They acquire foundational skills that lead to reading success,…

Common ground in the interdisciplinary research process is the pivot from disciplinary to interdisciplinary perspective. As thinking moves from disciplinary to interdisciplinary, what is the shape or structure of attention, how does intellectual content transform in the attending process? Four common ground techniques--extension, redefinition,…

The complex group work environment can be overwhelming and anxiety provoking, particularly for novice group leaders. Effectively accessing and managing one's own emotions are tasks central to effective group leadership and should be primary learning objectives of group workers in training. This article provides an overview of Gross's…

If adult attention is screen scrambled, what about kids, whose brains are still developing? In a world where we are over stimulated and hyperlinked-in we are deprived of the kind of time with a person or experience that deepens and sustains us. Here, poet laureate George Ella Lyon writes that the story circle can be such an experience. A school…

Bhatt and Quinn (2011) present a compelling case that human learning is "early" in two very different, but interacting, senses. Learning is "developmentally" early in that even infants show strikingly robust adaptation to the structures present in their world. Learning is also early in an information processing sense because infants adapt their…

Joint attention involves the organization of attention between oneself, an object or event, and another person with the purpose of sharing interest. Simply put, joint attention requires a child to "socially coordinate the attention with other people." This initiating of joint attention (as opposed to responding to joint attention) is particularly…

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…

The functional organization of working memory (WM) in the human prefrontal cortex remains unclear. The present study used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to clarify the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) both in the types of information (verbal vs. spatial), and the types of processes (maintenance vs.…

A theory is presented that attempts to answer two questions. What visual contents can an observer consciously access at one moment? Answer: only one feature value (e.g., green) per dimension, but those feature values can be associated (as a group) with multiple spatially precise locations (comprising a single labeled Boolean map). How can an…

Training over a 6-month period in which a moderately retarded 10-year-old was asked to direct his attention to simulus properties on a visual level resulted in significant improvement in concept development, social comprehension, and understanding of instructions. (CL)

Leisure items (e.g., games, toys) are commonly made available as controls during attention conditions of functional analyses (Ringdahl, Winborn, Andelman, & Kitsukawa, 2002). However, Ringdahl et al. raised questions about this practice. This paper reviews research that supports and conflicts with the inclusion of leisure items as controls,…