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…

There is an inextricable link between attention and learning, yet AIED systems in 2015 are largely blind to learners' attentional states. We argue that next-generation AIED systems should have the ability to monitor and dynamically (re)direct attention in order to optimize allocation of sparse attentional resources. We present some initial ideas…

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…

The problem of how best to capture, direct, and enhance children's abilities to pay attention has been a central feature of educational thought and practices over a long duration. And, while having students pay attention in class has been a concern of teachers across the ages, beginning in the Enlightenment we find a significant shift in…

The component selection procedure developed by Hale and Morgan was used to assess children's use of selective attention at six levels of learning ranging from undertraining to overtraining. This function was examined at each of ages 4, 8, and 12. (SBT)

Two studies were performed to evaluate the extent to which response patterns and sustained attentiveness is a function of the demands of a secondary task, primary task difficulty, and feedback arrangements. The first study varied primary task stimulus difficulty level, feedback arrangements on the primary task, and presence of the secondary task.…

Children of ages 5 and 8 years were given one of three learning tasks: (a) a component selection problem, in which two stimulus components were redundant and (b) two incidental learning tasks, in which one component of the stimuli was task-relevant and the other was incidental. A posttest, measuring the children's recall for information about each…

The relationship between selective attention and learning is investigated in this paper. It is proposed that two forms of attention exist: (1) inspectional attention, which is a simple matching pocess where perceived stimuli are compared with an internal model of the stimulus for which the individual is searching, and (2) comprehensional…

This study investigated the effects of prior experience with contingent or noncontingent stimulation of infants' ability to learn different responses to control perceptual stimulation. In the pretest phase, baseline rates of level movement, panel press and vocal responding were determined for each of the twelve, 6-month-old infants in the study.…

Fifty-four elementary school children who had been identified as consistently inattentive to classroom activities were involved in a four-week treatment program. Attention was assessed using a time-sampling observational instrument developed for the study, based upon a previously-developed technique. Subjects were assigned randomly to either an…