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Overcoming Attention Deficits
Attention deficits (deficits means lacks or shortages) are very common in both children and adults. Most often, these deficits do not interfere noticeably with the person's general life performance. Indeed, most of us will have had trouble paying attention at one time or another. We all tend to have difficulty paying attention when we do not understand the subject.
For instance, many people have a difficult time paying attention in math class, but pay attention in literature, history, or sports. Likewise, when children miss the point of one class, in any subject, they may start having difficulty understanding the next few classes in the same subject. This may lead them to reduce their attention to that subject.
The amount of variety and of rewarding elements in the task tend to influence our ability to pay attention. Therefore, attention reduction mechanisms include boring and restrictive surroundings, droning voices, long and boring explanations, constant repetition of seemingly meaningless activities. As you can see, most school classrooms are filled with attention reduction mechanisms. More causes for the reduction of school children's ability to pay attention tend to be non-rewarding situations, monotonous environments, and being passed to higher levels without having learned the current material.
It is important to remember that attention is not a "yes or no" type of quality.
A person may have the ability to pay attention under some circumstances and not under others. Most children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder are quite capable of concentrating for two hours while watching a movie, or can play a Nintendo game without loosing concentration. Their attention deficit is selective. In other words, they are capable of attending. But their response to attention reducing mechanisms is greater than that of most other children.
Consequently, the first two key elements to develop in an attention deficit treatment program are the elimination of unnecessary attention reduction mechanisms and the creation of as many attention grabbing mechanisms as possible. In other words, boring elements like windowless, tan rooms, and assignments that has the student do the same type of task over and over and over again make a child stop paying attention. Interesting elements like an attractively painted rooms with posters and windows, and teacher led cheering of student efforts make a child pay attention. After the environment is set to maximize attention, if the child still has problems staying on task in given areas, a time on task incremental program can take care of the rest of the attention deficit.
A time on task incremental program is when the amount of time spent on a task is increased a little bit at a time.
Let’s look more closely at attention reduction mechanisms.
The first thing to realize about attention reduction mechanisms is that they are different for each person.
This means that the farther from normal (in the attention department) a person is, the more unique this person's attending needs will be. For instance, I have great difficulty paying attention to almost any thing. But I have no problem paying attention to TWO different things simultaneously. So, I listen to music, watch TV, or converse while I read or study. If I try to read without an additional environmental stimulus, I tend to find myself five or six pages further ahead, and I don't remember how I got there. My attention needs carefully selected distractors to stay alert. Therefore, standardized, traditional attention increasing procedures, such as eliminating all distractive stimuli from the environment are detrimental to my attention paying ability. Removing distractions actually hurts my ability to pay attention. So, the adults that tried to help me become a better student when I was a child kept creating environments that made my ability to concentrate reduce progressively. And they kept getting annoyed at me, concluding that I was a brat. Thank God there was no Ritalin when I was a child.
In my practice as a behavior analyst, I have encountered often that adults have a pre-conception as to how children should pay attention. A few years ago, I was called to help a nine-year-old that was about to be expelled from school for misbehaving when he was supposed to be paying attention. The child was a normal, well behaved child. He really did not know why he was in trouble. So, I did what I normally do (observe and infer) and soon came to a simple conclusion. Whenever the child was asked to pay attention, he would become restless. He did not know what to do in that situation. I gently asked him if he knew what “paying attention” meant and, just as I expected, he told me he did not know. So, I taught him "the paying attention position." We practiced it so that he could be active and still seem to be paying attention, and we turned it into a fun game. After only a couple of sessions of my teaching the little boy “the paying attention position“ the teacher reported a marked improvement in his behavior, and the teacher-student relationship improved enough for the child to start getting good grades.
The main points to remember are that:
1) Each case of attention deficit or problem is unique and must be seen as such.
2) There are not and can not be standard procedures or drugs that are applicable to all attention deficit cases.
3) But there are processes that can be implemented in each unique case.
There are different kinds of attention deficits. For instance, if your child is watching TV, after wards ask them questions about the show. In some cases, the child may spend hours in front of the TV, but may not have paid attention to any thing. Attention may also be totally selective. In other words a child is apt to select something to focus attention on, and what a child selects varies from child to child. One child may remember the people's clothes, another child may remember the sets, and yet another may remember only the action. Some children will remember every thing in one show and nothing in another. Such random and narrowly focused types of attention cause problems for children, especially in school settings because what the teacher or even parent wishes a child to be paying attention to is not what the child is paying attention to. Often what the child pays attention to is not helping them get the information they need from the task. Besides the attention deficit caused by a child’s selecting inappropriate things to pay attention to, there is another type of attention deficit where the child is not able to pay attention for more than a few minutes. Within that few minutes their attention is very good, but their attention does not last nearly long enough for the child to finish the entire task. This is what happens to hyperactive children and is why many children are diagnosed ADHAD--attention deficit hyper active disorder.
Let’s summarize common types of attention deficits:
1) Hours may be spent on a task without enough attention to it to remember doing the task.
2) Inappropriate selection of what is to be paid attention to.
3) Inability to pay attention long enough to complete a task.
Correcting attention deficits means to make any person’s, adult or child’s attention good enough to perform a whole task properly. Before you can correct an attention deficit you must first determine in what situations the child pays attention and in which situations the child does not. Then you need to know how much time the child spends on the on the task (time on task), and how well the child does the task (performance). The child’s performance during the time on task is what really counts. Once you know this there are three procedures that each help to correct attention deficits and can all be used together for a very effective means of correcting the child’s attention deficits. The first procedure to help the child is to point out to her the things she is ignoring, and make paying attention to those things fun. Next, use an increasing criterion design to increase time on task. Don't worry about the behavior analyst term increasing criterion design because the term only means that as the child performs better, you will require more from her. Third, a technique that can help any body including people with normal attention spans, is to incrementally adjust the continuous time a person can pay attention. In other words, simply increase the amount of time a person stays on task by a little bit at a time. This is best done by following the time on task incremental program.
But first, let’s summarize what will make an adult or child‘s attention good enough to complete a task properly:
1) Find out
a) in what situations the person pays attention and when they don’t.
b) how well a person does a task in the time the person spends on the task.
2) Correction procedures:
a) Point out what the person has missed in the task in a way that is fun.
b) As the person performs the task better have them do it again better still.
c) Increase how much time the person spends on the task a little bit at time.
A Time on Task Incremental Program is described on another page. Click here to learn more
My Philosophy My experience CP and Karate More about Karate
Achilles Tendon Problems Intelligence Pages Nutrition Hyperactivity Time on Task Treatment
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