In the New York Times article, "Find It Hard to Focus? Maybe It's Not Your Fault" author Casey Schwartz discusses how technology has captured the attention of all of us. It has been difficult to not be around technology, especially during COVID-19. Entering a lockdown, it forced must of us to rely on our technology to stay connected to the world, work, and school. The need for technology has become something like an addiction. Tech companies have tried to help this issue. Social media apps like Facebook and Instagram have a setting that can limit how much time you spend there. There are more rigorous programs like HabitLab which have interventions for internet use. But the internet continues to grab our attention. Schwartz discussed how researchers know that there are two types of attention, top-down and bottom-up. Top-down attention is when you decide to focus your attention on something while bottom-up is when something involuntarily grabs your attention.
Adults have not been the only ones that have had their attention disturbed. Schwartz reports that teachers have recently reported how attention spans are completely different in children from years before. Teachers have also discussed how children have two types of attention: deep or hyper attention. Deep attention will have children only focus on one thing while hyper attention will have children focusing on ,any different things. A neurodevelopment disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), has also increased in the number of diagnoses in children.
A speaker, Jasmine Kwasa, came to Loyola University Chicago and discussed their paper, "Top-down attention modulated auditory-evoked neural responses in neurotypical, but not ADHD, young adults". The paper looked at attention differences with auditory stimuli in ADHD and neurotypical participants. Participants completed a task that look at the interactions between top-down and bottom-up attention. They had to complete two kinds of trials, FOCAL and BROAD. The FOCAL trials had participants focus their attention on a target and report the order of phonemes (a unit of sound like /ba/ or /pa/) that they heard. The BROAD trials had participants focus on a target until they hard an 'Interrupter'. They then had to focus on it and report the phonemes it was producing. The results that were concluded were that those with ADHD produce a weaker neural response at attentional focus compared to those were neurotypical. Also, the N1 response (an event-related electrical potential that was recorded from the scalp) was reduced in participants with ADHD compared to those who are neurotypical. The authors on the paper believe that this could be that those with ADHD cannot use top-down attention as well to precent the interrupting events.
I would be interested to see the research that Kwasa did when applied to technology noises instead of phonemes. I believe that individuals that are neurotypical and have ADHD would have a difficult time using their top-down attention to not focus on sounds that are related to technology. These sounds could be an Apple text message, a Facebook, or an Instagram notification. It would also be interesting to compare different generations, children with or without ADHD and young adults. I wonder if there would be attention differences for those who have used technology longer. Do you think you would have an easy time ignoring a text message notification?
References
Kwasa, J. A., Noyce, A. L., Torres, L. M., & Shinn-Cunningham, B. G. (n.d). Top-down attention modulates auditory-evoked neural responses in neurotypical but not ADHD, young adults. https://dio.org/10.1101/2021.02.11.430824
Schwartz, C. (2018, August 14). Finding it hard to focus? maybe it's not your fault. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/08/14/stype/how-can-i-focus-better.html
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