Factors That Influence Your Attention

Source: Image by Melani Marfeld from Pixabay

Attention is a way of giving priority to information. Attention is one of the key productive factors in the modern economy. Our capacity to acquire and process information is fundamentally limited. Attending to one task or source of information necessarily excludes other potential efforts, thereby generating opportunity costs. This means that we must often make consequential choices about what we pay attention to.

The followings illustrate how attention is oriented, voluntarily or involuntarily (Loewenstein, 2023).

1. Attention as a scarce mental resource

Our working memory forms the basis of our attentional resource. Working memory is defined as the ability to control attention, and distraction (e.g., irrelevant emails or text messages). Individuals with better working memory (and higher intelligence) are more skillful at shifting attention away from the tempting aspects of the immediate rewards.

Working memory can be temporarily impaired by anxiety or stress, craving, and alcohol intoxication. When people are exhausted or anxious, their willpower is drained. Stress and exhaustion ruin our attention. From an economizing perspective ignoring useless information can help people increase their capacity to remember what is important. We can also avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps.

2. Spontaneous attention

Attention can be automatically drawn toward certain types of stimuli that are related to emotions (e.g., words associated with sadness or threat). Strong feelings such as hunger directly draw attention to a specific goal of consuming foods. And these feelings grab your attention and determine which thoughts enter consciousness.

3. Deliberate attention

Deliberate attention is guided by memories, goals, and beliefs. Deliberately redirecting one’s gaze, making an effort to hear a single voice among many, or thinking about a question are all examples of such control. The process is slower and effortful. Deliberate attention can modify or in some cases override the work of spontaneous attention.

4. Motivation

Motivation is the driving force that determines how we focus our attention. Certain feeling states motivate us to shift our attention. For example, feelings like boredom and curiosity motivate a person’s volitional control of attention. According to the concept of “mood-congruent memory”, positive or negative moods trigger thoughts and memories that reinforce those states and influence our attention. Motivational determinants can conflict with people’s other goals and priorities, leading to attentional self-control problems. For example, boredom can make it difficult to sustain the practice necessary to master a new skill.

5. Attention seeking

The ability to get attention can be enormously valuable, which may explain why being ignored is emotionally painful. However, attention-seeking can be self-destructive. People can become compulsive in their need to receive attention from others. Research shows that people pay about half as much attention to us as we think they do (known as the spotlight effect).

6. Selective attention

People’s current beliefs and their viewpoints of the world influence the types of information they attend to and ignore. This explains why certain types of false beliefs persist in the face of readily available information. Such biases can also be found in anxious individuals, who view the world as dangerous. For example, if you are worried that someone is annoyed with you, you are biased toward all the negative information about that person acts toward you. This kind of self-focused attention is thought to underlie disorders such as social anxiety. Self-focused attention prevents them from attending to other information that might disconfirm their beliefs.

7. Motivated ignorance

Motivated ignorance means that the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits. The pleasures and pains of paying attention to particular issues can lead to over- and under-investment in learning about them. For example, everyone implicitly knows they must eventually die (a potentially scary thought) but most people rarely think about it unless they are reminded. This explains why individuals actively use “distracting” activities (movies, drugs, gambling, and alcohol) to escape negative thoughts.

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In today’s world, a wealth of information consumes our attention, and we need to decide how to allocate our limited mental resources. Like money, attention is the ultimate scarce cognitive resource that needs to be allocated wisely.