Our ability to pay attention to tasks, which is essential in our daily lives, is highly influenced by characteristics such as motivation, arousal, and alertness. Maintaining focus can be especially difficult when the activity at hand is tedious or repetitive.
“In many activities, it is difficult to maintain a high level of focus over time. Our research asks why this is the case,”
said Matthew K. Robison, assistant professor of psychology at University of Texas at Arlington. He recently published a new study on attention maintenance, along with colleagues at the University of Oregon.
“Our results provide evidence that a simple and easily implementable change in behavior —s etting specific goals for oneself — can significantly improve our ability to maintain task focus over time,”
Robison said. The finding has implications for situations like studying or working, where a lack of focus can lead to poor performance.
Studying Attention Lapses
Although people generally perform well in situations requiring prolonged attention, they are frequently distracted, which can lead to attention lapses. Distractions might range from daydreaming about a new romantic interest to reacting to an automobile honking.
Most attention lapses have minor consequences, like forgetting to forward an email or pick up an item at the grocery store. Other lapses, however, can have serious consequences, such as a train operator failing to react to an incident, a surgeon forgetting a step in an operation, or a person forgetting to turn off an oven.
According to Robison, maintaining attention can be easier said than done because attention swings between short and lengthy intervals. Examining response time in a range of tasks has been one of the most prevalent techniques of investigate attention lapses.
Set Harder, Specific Goals
Robison and colleagues recruited over 100 participants for this study, who completed reaction time tests for roughly 25 minutes. In a typical control condition, participants were simply instructed to answer as soon as possible on each trial (about 200 in total).
Collectively, the results suggest that goal-setting manipulations enhanced sustained attention and reduced lapses in attention.
“In this condition, reaction times systematically increased across time, consistent with the idea that task focus was decreasing,” Robison said. “However, when we gave them specific goals to pursue and made those goals harder over time (e.g., keeping their reaction time below 450 milliseconds, then 400, then 350), they did not show that effect.”
The current findings suggest that goal-setting techniques can help people maintain their attention and reduce attention lapses.
Abstract
In three experiments, we examined the effects of goal-setting on sustained attention and attention lapses. We measured both behavioral task performance and subjective attentional states during a four -choice reaction time task (Experiments 1 and 2 administered online; Experiment 3 conducted in-person). Experiment 1 compared a vague goal versus a specific goal. The specific goal reduced lapses in the form of long response times (RTs) but did not impact task-unrelated thoughts. Experiment 2 expanded on E1 by making the specific goal progressively harder. Behavioral lapses (i.e., long RTs) were reduced in the harder-over-time goal condition compared to the control condition. Additionally, while RTs increased with time-on-task in the control condition, RTs in the harder-over-time goal condition remained stable with time-on-task. Experiment 3 aimed to replicate the results of E2 in-person and adjusted the difficulty of the harder-over-time goals to be slightly harder. The results largely replicated E2. Overall, setting specific and difficult task goals led to a reduction in lapses of attention and increased sustained attention performance.
Reference:
- Strayer, D.L., Robison, M.K. & Unsworth, N. Effects of goal-setting on sustained attention and attention lapses. Atten Percept Psychophys (2023). doi: 10.3758/s13414-023-02803-4