Attention is the critical skill which allows you to select important information while ignoring all irrelevant data. This skill allows you to concentrate on only the relevant tasks at hand, such as regular daily activities, and perform them efficiently. For example, when driving a car you should ignore events occurring on the sidewalk, but pay absolute attention to what’s happening on the road. Or, you should be able to watch your children while cooking, talking on the phone or watching television.
Our more important types of attention include Selective Attention, which enables us to focus on one task intensively (such as playing a sport), and Divided Attention which enables us to distribute our resources over several objects simultaneously.
Unfortunately, like other important cognitive abilities, our attention capabilities are likely to decrease gradually as we age. Luckily, however, recent research has determined that attention skills can be trained and improved in older adults. Indeed, studies not only indicate that training attentional skills improves one’s attention skills, but these improvements may be retained for as much as five years after training. Trained participants displayed higher performance levels when conducting their daily activities such as finances, housework and driving etc.
Do you fail to absorb relevant information at work, while watching TV or reading the newspaper etc.? Are you preoccupied at times and subsequently distracted from completing certain tasks? Do you wish you were a better multi-tasker?
Divided Attention training games are designed to help you enhance your ability to manage and process various data simultaneously and with little difficulty. We encounter this task throughout our daily lives. For instance, while driving a car and listening to music, or talking on the phone while cooking. The list, of course, goes on.
Also known as “focused attention,” orienting attention refers to the ability to respond to specific visual, auditory or tactile stimuli. Orienting attention is required when we are presented with two or more stimulus inputs at the same time, and instructed to respond to only one. This differs from “divided attention” whereby a person is also presented with at least two stimulus inputs, but required to attend and respond to all stimulus inputs simultaneously. Studies on orientation attention tell us how effectively we select certain inputs rather than others.
Training your selective attention enables you to boost your ability to remain focused in dynamic visual environments.
Selective attention training games are designed to help you improve your capacity to concentrate on one single item while ignoring all unnecessary information.
Sustained attention refers to a state in which attention must be maintained over a period of time. This is often required of people engaged in “watch-keeping” activities where, as listeners or observers, they must continuously monitor a situation in which unpredictable and infrequent events may occur. An example of sustained attention would be focusing on a radar screen in order to immediately detect any sudden blip that might signal an approaching ship or aircraft.
SwitchBall is designed to sharpen your ability to track moving objects.
