Attention

William James and the 1890 definition

William James gave one of the most cited early definitions of attention in The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. In the chapter titled Attention he writes that everyone knows what attention is, and describes it as the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. The copy used for this page is a Project Gutenberg text of a 1918 Henry Holt printing, whose preface is dated Harvard, August 1890. The definition treats attention as a matter of selection, a theme that later experimental work also took up.

James's chapter sets out a definition and discussion rather than the experimental findings that came later. The sources reviewed here do not trace a continuous line from it to modern laboratory work, and this page does not construct one. Carrasco's review of the 25 years before 2011 describes the field as concerned with how covert attention changes early visual processing, which is a narrower and more measured question than James's. James is therefore treated here as the origin of the psychological vocabulary, not as the origin of current experimental results.

Attention as a scarce resource

In a 1971 talk on designing organizations, the computer scientist and psychologist Herbert Simon argued that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. He reasoned that information consumes the attention of its recipients, so the design problem becomes allocating that scarce attention efficiently across many sources. The talk was printed in a Johns Hopkins Press volume edited by Martin Greenberger, with discussion by Karl Deutsch and Martin Shubik. It is an argument about organizations and information, not a laboratory study of the mind.

The phrase attention economy, which later writers use for this idea, was added after the talk. The sources reviewed for this page do not establish who first used it, so this page relies on Simon's own argument rather than the later label. The scarcity argument is useful for understanding why the word is now common in media and marketing, but it does not show that any particular product or practice restores attention.

Attention in psychology

Carrasco's review describes attention as a selective process and sets out its main constructs: covert attention, spatial endogenous and exogenous attention, and feature-based attention. The review focuses on covert attention and asks how it changes which stimuli are processed and how they look. Selection is the central idea in that work, which makes the term more specific than the general sense of paying attention to something.

Sustained attention is a separate construct in the same literature. Thomson, Besner and Smilek describe it as staying attentive over time, for example during a monotonous task or a long lecture. Their abstract frames sustained attention through the mind wandering and vigilance paradigms, and it notes that lapses can have serious consequences in tasks such as monitoring a gauge or driving.

Contemplative and everyday usage

Lutz and colleagues distinguish two meditation styles by how they use attention. Focused attention entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. Open monitoring involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. These are terms from a research review, and teachers and traditions may name and frame them differently.

Everyday and commercial uses of the word are broader. Slattery and colleagues describe a myriad of interventions that promote activities designed to enhance sustained attention, which shows how widely the goal is marketed to young people. Their review does not define the everyday term, and this page does not treat the everyday phrase as a scientific measure.

Related and confusable terms

Clinical research divides attention into alertness, selective attention, sustained attention and divided attention. The Cochrane review of stroke rehabilitation uses these as separate outcome domains, and a result in one domain does not show a change in another. These domains should be kept apart when reading any study of attention training.

Simon's attention economy argument concerns information and organizational design. It should not be merged with the psychological meaning of attention as a capacity to select and sustain focus, because the two answer different questions.

Contemplative training aims

Lutz and colleagues describe meditation as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes. The site's Meditation and Mindfulness pages cover these practices in more detail. This page does not describe how to perform them, and it treats attention as the aim that the contemplative literature discusses, not as a procedure.

Lutz and colleagues list the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance among the ends these regimes were developed for. They frame attention regulation as one part of a broader set of emotional and attentional training, so the contemplative aim is wider than any single attention task used in a laboratory.

Education and young people

Slattery and colleagues reviewed three popular approaches to sustained attention in children and adolescents: cognitive attention training, meditation and physical activity. Their review included 37 studies of people aged 3 to 18. The abstract reports 14 studies of cognitive attention training, 15 of physical activity and 8 of meditation interventions, and it treats the meditation and activity findings as preliminary.

Clinical rehabilitation

In clinical rehabilitation, cognitive rehabilitation is used for attention problems after stroke. The Cochrane review defines it as treatment aimed at impairments of attention. It specifically did not count listening to music, meditation, yoga or mindfulness as cognitive rehabilitation, so those practices belong to a different research tradition and should not be read as evidence about it.

Contemplative and wellness claims

Contemplative settings describe attention training as a route to well-being and emotional balance. Lutz and colleagues report this as a purpose for which meditation regimes were developed, not as a finding of their own review. Claims that attention can be sharpened by specific apps, routines or products are common in popular use. The sources reviewed here do not evaluate such products, and the review of children's interventions found that many popular approaches had not reliably improved sustained attention.

Wellbeing outcomes in trials

Goyal and colleagues tested whether meditation programs improve psychological wellbeing. Across 47 randomized trials with 3,320 participants, they reported moderate evidence of improvement in anxiety, with a standardized mean difference of 0.38 at eight weeks, and in depression, with a value of 0.30 at eight weeks. They also reported moderate evidence of improvement in pain, with a value of 0.33. Smaller effects for anxiety and depression were reported at three to six months.

Stress and mental health quality of life were graded as having low evidence of improvement, and the version of the review read for this page did not give effect sizes for them. These wellbeing outcomes are not attention outcomes. The trials compared programs with active controls matched for time and attention, and the review does not show that the programs changed attention on a task.

Attention claims tested in trials

The attention outcomes that have been tested give more limited support. Slattery and colleagues report that cognitive attention training did not reliably improve sustained attention, and that mindfulness training had rather consistent positive effects on selective attention in young people. In adults after stroke, Loetscher and colleagues found no convincing effect of cognitive rehabilitation on sustained or selective attention.

Selective attention in the laboratory

Carrasco's review covers how covert attention changes visual processing. It describes how spatial attention alters the discriminability and appearance of stimuli in contrast and resolution tasks, and how feature-based attention affects basic visual processes. The review is mainly psychophysical and also cites electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies. It does not test contemplative practice, and it is a review of experiments rather than a trial of training.

Sustained attention and lapses

Thomson and colleagues review two accounts of sustained-attention lapses over time on a task. One holds that task monotony increases preoccupation with internal thought, and the other that task demands deplete the processing resources needed to perform. They conclude that neither account on its own explains the full range of findings, and they propose a resource-control framework that combines aspects of both. The paper is a theoretical review and reports no intervention effects.

Attention training

Slattery and colleagues found that cognitive attention training did not reliably improve sustained attention and showed very limited transfer to other aspects of attention. Physical activity and meditation showed somewhat more potential, but the authors describe these effects as preliminary and in need of replication with greater methodological rigor. Across all three approaches they found very weak evidence of transfer to other aspects of cognition, behavior and academic achievement.

The Cochrane review of stroke rehabilitation included six randomized trials with 223 participants, all comparing cognitive rehabilitation with usual care. It found a possible short-term improvement in divided attention, rated as low quality, with uncertain persistence at follow-up. It found no evidence of immediate or persistent effects on alertness, selective attention or sustained attention, and the review rated the subjective attention evidence as very low quality.

Wellbeing outcomes and their limits

The meditation review rates most of its outcomes at low or moderate certainty. Its authors report that many older trials did not report key design features, were unregistered or did not prespecify outcomes, and that outcome assessors were often not blinded and attrition was often high. They also report that training dose and home practice were poorly reported, and that trials were short. Their overall conclusion is that no outcome reached high confidence.

Taken together, the sources reviewed here show that attention is a well-defined research topic, but that trials of training it give mixed and mostly limited results on attention itself. The reviews cover children, adults after stroke and general wellbeing samples, so findings from one group should not be carried to another. The effect sizes cited here come from the reviews' own summaries, and the Slattery abstract was read without its full tables. This page does not treat any practice as an established attention intervention.

Reported harms

Goyal and colleagues state that few of the trials they reviewed reported harms, and that none of those that did reported any. Absence of reported harm in short trials does not establish that a practice has no adverse effects, and this page does not treat it as a finding of safety.

Where attention lapses matter for safety, the stakes are higher. Thomson and colleagues note in their abstract that lapses may be life threatening, for example when a pilot fails to monitor an oil-pressure gauge or a truck driver fails to notice a car in a blind spot. This is a reason to take attention problems seriously, not a claim about any practice.

When attention problems need assessment

The Cochrane review concerns attention deficits that follow stroke, which are a medical problem treated through rehabilitation. Attention problems can have many causes, and this page does not replace assessment, diagnosis or treatment by a clinician. A practice aimed at attention should not delay or replace care that a person needs.

Gaps in the reviewed sources

The abstract of the children's review reports effects on attention and transfer, but the abstract read for this page does not describe harms of attention training in the detail needed for a safety assessment. The sources reviewed also do not compare contemplative practices directly with one another in adults, and this page did not find a source reporting durable attention gains in adults.