Welcome! This blog has been created to teach about the importance of attention in learning. I hope everyone will find this blog informative. Please feel free to leave a comment!

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Factors Influencing Attention

There are several factors that can influence attention: motion, size, intensity, novelty, incongruity, emotion, personal significance and social cues. (Ormrod, 2008) Each of these factors can increase or decrease a persons attention to a certain object, person or concept.
  • Motion: Adults and children are more likely to pay attention to an object with there is motion involved. (Ormrod, 2008)
    •   Example: Children are more drawn to toys that move such as toy cars.
  • Size: Objects or text that are larger gain more attention than normal or small objects.  
    • Example: Traffic signs are large and are usually in all capital letters.

  •   Intensity: Intense objects or text garner attention. 
    • Example: Bright colors attract more attention than plain black text. 
  •  Novelty: "Stimuli that are novel or unusual is some way tend to draw people's attention."         (Ormrod, 2008, p. 172) 
    • Example: A person will pay attention to a two-headed goat before a one-headed goat, because a two-headed is not something that a person see every day.
  •  Emotion: Words with strong emotional connections seem to gain more attention than others. 
    • Example: In nursing school, our teacher would say, "this could kill your patient", when she would say that all students would perk up and pay attention due to the nature of her statement.
  • Personal Significance:  A person is more likely to pay attention to a person or concept that hold personal significance to them.
    • Example: If a person has had a family member or friend diagnosed with cancer, they are more likely to pay attention to a lecture about cancer, because they know how it could affect their lives.
  • Social cues: "People are more likely to pay attention to things they see others looking at or reacting to." (Ormrod, 2008, p. 173)
    • Example: If you see a crowd of people staring at something you will try to find out what the group is reacting to, its human curiosity.  

Here is a link to a website that you can test your brain and work on your attention span!
http://www.sharpbrains.com/teasers/

8 comments:

  1. Great section about factors that influence our attention! I really like your use of color and your background, too. Good work!

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  2. This is a great, informative section. I know I am one who has a short attention span and I need all the help I can get!

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  3. hello Sarah
    May I have the reference for this one (Ormrod, 2008)

    ReplyDelete
  4. hello Sarah
    May I have the reference for this one (Ormrod, 2008)

    ReplyDelete
  5. GOOD DAY!! May I have the Complete reference for this one (Ormrod, 2008). Thank you very much!!

    ReplyDelete