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…

Paying attention is a critical first step toward learning. For children in primary school classrooms there can be many things to attend to other than the focus of a lesson, such as visual displays on classroom walls. The aim of this study was to use eye-tracking techniques to explore the impact of visual displays on attention and learning for…

Distraction is a typical component of any classroom environment. For effective instruction and learning to take place, it is critical for students to eventually return to task and maintain task vigilance (i.e., returning to the task at hand) when a distraction occurs. Students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), by definition,…

Rapidly changing environments in day-to-day activities, enriched with stimuli competing for attention, require a cognitive control mechanism to select relevant stimuli, ignore irrelevant stimuli, and shift attention between alternative features of the environment. Such attentional orchestration is essential to the acquisition of reading skills. In…

When searching for a "pop-out" target, interference from a salient but irrelevant distractor can be reduced or even prevented under certain circumstances. Here, five experiments were conducted to further our understanding of three different aspects of top-down interference reduction: first, whether or not qualitatively different search modes can…

In recent years, gloss presentation format or the location where a gloss appears with respect to its related target word has received renewed attention. Research suggested that different gloss presentation formats could have differential effects on reading comprehension and/or vocabulary learning. This study hypothesized that the effectiveness of…

This study investigated the effect of nursing experience on attention allocation and task performance during surgery. The prevention of cases of retained foreign bodies after surgery typically depends on scrub nurses, who are responsible for performing multiple tasks that impose heavy demands on the nurses' cognitive resources. However, the…

In this study, we examined attention processes in complex, sport-specific decision-making tasks without interdependencies from anticipation. Psychophysiological and performance data recorded from advanced and intermediate level basketball referees were compared. Event-related potentials obtained while judging game situations in foul recognition…

Although the perceptual load theory of attention has stimulated a great deal of research, evidence for the role of perceptual load in determining perception has typically relied on indirect measures that infer perception from distractor effects on reaction times or neural activity (see N. Lavie, 2005, for a review). Here we varied the level of…

Examined in two studies the moderating effect of perceptual load on visual selective attention. Found that children's performance was as efficient as adults' under conditions of high but not low loads, suggesting that early selection engages rapidly maturing neural systems and late selection engages later-maturing systems. The onset of early…

Examined performance on ventromedial prefrontal tasks of preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), preschoolers with developmental delays, and typically- developing 12- to 46-month-olds, matched on mental age. Found that children with ASD performed similarly to comparison groups on all executive function tasks. Ventromedial, but not…

Examined distractibility during visual fixations in 6- to 24-month-olds. Found that latency to turn toward a distractor was a function of length of look before distractor onset. Immediately before onset, children had greater sustained lowered heart rate for trials on which they continued looking at television monitor than for trials on which they…

Five experiments (conducted in 1968 on observing responses and vigilance, reward preferences, and learning strategies in concept formation) indicate that socioeconomic level (SEL) has an influence on intellectual and educational functioning of elementary school children. Expectation of reinforcement was tested in experiment 1, using 60…

Examined role of toddlers' attention deployment strategies in predicting 5-year-olds' delay-of-gratification strategies. Found that toddlers' use of effective attention deployment strategies to cope with separation from mother and with maternal behavior (controlling or noncontrolling) predicted effective delay-of-gratification strategies at age 5,…