Lack of attention

Inattention and distractibility

Limited processing capacity invariably implies a competition for attention. Humans spend their waking hours attending to one thing or another. The term inattention usually implies that, at a given moment, the thing being attended to is either not what it was intended to be or not what adaptively it ought to be. People will often report, “I was present, but I was not taking in what was happening.” On many such occasions, internal preoccupations become the object of current attention at the expense of sensory information from the external world. Alternatively, an internal stimulus, such as a pain or hunger, might capture attention. It is also possible for irrelevant sensory information from the external world to distract individuals from their current focus of attention. When this happens, it could be because the intrusive stimulus has a high priority (such as the ringing of a telephone) or perhaps because the task engaged in is simply uninteresting.

Some individuals are more easily distracted than others, but for everyone distractibility varies with circumstances. When motivation and the level of involvement are high, an individual may totally disregard intense and persistent “outside” signals. Such inputs are either heavily filtered or dealt with only at an automatic level. Even when the competing stimulus is pain from an injury sustained, say, by an athlete in the early stages of a game, it is often scarcely noticed until the game ends and attention is no longer absorbed by the game. Nevertheless, because people’s ability to focus attention varies, some report “difficulties of concentration” and may find themselves so easily distracted that they can scarcely read a book. There are indications that persons who are chronically anxious may be among those whose attention can readily be distracted by quite modest and irrelevant levels of stimuli. This feature has been noted in a number of psychiatric disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and it has been suggested that one cause of these disorders may be a flaw in the mechanisms of attention.

Lapses of attention

It has been established that, to conserve limited resources, whole sequences and hierarchies of actions can apparently be elicited without focal attention when they have been well learned or executed many times. There is reason, however, to suppose that at least a minimum level of focal attention may be necessary, if only to ensure that the correct sequence or hierarchy is initiated. Failures of this minimal monitoring can result in the phenomena usually classed as lapses of attention. For example, most people have experienced trivial behavioral slips such as finding themselves taking a regularly used route when they had meant to go in a different direction; attempting to switch off a light when leaving a room in daylight; or, perhaps, pouring tea into the sugar bowl instead of a cup. In each case a well-established action has been inappropriately triggered by partial cues and has slipped past the attentional monitor. Such errors typically occur because a person was “thinking about something else” or was not paying attention to the activity at hand. In many circumstances it is advantageous that automatic sequences of behaviour should be executed with only very limited reference to conscious attention. Musicians, typists, and other skilled persons are well aware that too much attention devoted to the execution of a well-learned skill can disrupt performance. Nevertheless, people cannot dispense entirely with some degree of attentional monitoring if they are to avoid errors. Another kind of lapse entails being unable to remember whether one has performed a particular action as part of a highly automated sequence: “Did I or did I not put the sugar in my tea?” Yet another occurs when an automatic action triggers another unwanted or inappropriate action: “I meant to take off only my shoes but took off my socks as well.” Most lapses have in common that they occur when attention has been claimed by an internal preoccupation or external distraction.