By Catherine A. Sanderson, Amherst College
How the human brain switches from one level of consciousness to another is amazing. In some situations, we focus all of our attention on one task, like when learning to drive, or watching a movie, or learning a new subject. But even in these cases, when we should be focusing on one thing, why does our mind wander to something else?
Selective Attention and Inattention
When we feel our minds drifting away to other thoughts, we often pull ourselves back to the thing we are supposed to be focusing on. This process, when we catch and then deliberately control our stream of consciousness, is called selective attention.
However, forcing ourselves to pay attention to something is not the only way we deliberately control our stream of consciousness. We also do the exact opposite; we deliberately ignore things that are threatening or anxiety-provoking.
Maybe we are getting ready to move but just don’t want to think about all the packing. Maybe one has been worrying health symptom that one is trying to put out of their mind. This process of deliberately redirecting our attention away from one thing to something else is called selective inattention.
Selective attention and selective inattention are both examples of consciously choosing what we do and don’t pay attention to. But in other cases, we aren’t making this type of a conscious choice.
Inattentional Blindness
There is a clever and pretty well-known study in psychology in which researchers brought in college students and asked them to watch a video of a basketball activity. The students were told to count the number of passes between players.
In the middle of the game, a grown man dressed in a full-body gorilla costume walks through the middle of the activity. At the end of the activity, the researchers asked students if they had noticed anything unusual. Half of the students reported not noticing anything.
They were so busy counting the passes that they literally didn’t see a gorilla. This example illustrates inattentional blindness—blindness caused by not paying attention.
It is interesting to note that this is the very concept that magicians apply and regularly amaze audiences by misdirecting attention away from some small sleight of hand.
This article comes directly from content in the video series Introduction to Psychology. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
ADHD
One of the hallmark symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is having difficulty staying focused, especially on tasks that don’t seem engaging.
Attention is easily distracted by sights and sounds in the environment: looking out the window, glancing at a clock, listening to other conversations around them. But although paying attention may be harder for some people than others, not paying attention affects everyone, from making careless errors to losing belongings: umbrellas, glasses, phones.
Driving and Talking on a Phone
David Strayer at the University of Utah has conducted a series of studies that consistently reveal how talking on a phone disrupts our ability to drive safely.
Here’s a simple example of one of his studies. He put people in a driving simulator under one of three conditions: with no distractions at all, while talking on a hands-free phone, and while listening to the radio or an audio book. He then rated how well people did in each of the three driving conditions.
Drivers talking on a phone were much slower to react to external events, like a traffic light turning yellow, or the car in front of them braking. And talking on a phone led to much worse driving than listening to the radio or an audio book.
This suggests that it’s not just listening to something that causes a problem; it’s that having a conversation with someone virtually requires us to pay attention to what the person is saying and to respond. On the other hand, while listening to radio, we can mentally disconnect because it doesn’t demand such focus.
Talking to Passengers in the Car
And yet, if having a conversation is what causes problems, then drivers should be equally impaired when they have passengers in the car.
In order to test this question, researchers at the University of Illinois designed a clever study to try to disentangle how talking to a passenger in a car differs from talking on a phone.
In this study, they put people in a driving simulator in one of four distinct driving conditions: driving alone and not talking on a phone, driving and talking to a passenger in the car, driving and talking on a hands-free phone, people talking on a special videophone.
The researchers went on to measure how the drivers did. Not surprisingly, the safest condition involved no talking at all, no passengers and no phone use. However, the next safest was talking with a passenger in the car. Predictably, the very worst condition was one in which one was driving while talking on a regular phone, with just the audio.
Driving and Being on a Video Call
As expected, people on a regular phone were most unsafe and were three times more likely to have a collision. What was interesting to note was, however, that, the video call option was the same in terms of safety as having a passenger in the car.
This was so because the person on the video call could see what was going on just as a co-passenger would. Both, typically, seeing traffic or a difficult road maneuver, would stop talking so that the driver could concentrate.
Powerful Scientific Evidence
This study provides powerful scientific evidence showing exactly why phone conversation impairs driving in ways that passive listening to radio or active conversation with a passenger do not.
It also suggests that linking dashcams feeds to our calls when driving might help make talking while driving safer, just by giving our conversation partners more awareness of our driving conditions. One can, thus, safely unequivocally conclude that having our attention pulled, deliberately or accidentally, in a different direction can have real, substantial and even sometimes tragic consequences.
Common Questions about Levels of Consciousness and Focusing Attention
The process of deliberately redirecting our attention away from one thing to something else is called selective inattention.
One of the hallmark symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is having difficulty staying focused, especially on tasks that don’t seem engaging.
This process, when we catch and then deliberately control our stream of consciousness, is called selective attention.
