3 Simple Lessons in Learning and Attention | Cognitive Load, External Focus, Distraction, etc.

What does attention have to do with learning? A lot. Here's a very short summary of some of the more interesting findings in the research on attention and learning in three simple lessons.

00:00 Lesson one - four stories about attention
2:21 One way of thinking about attention and learning
3:07 Lesson two - what controls attention?
4:06 Lesson three - the roles of students and teachers

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The artwork I mentioned in the example comes from:

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany by Hannah Höch (1919)

The Elephant Celebes by Max Ernst (1921)

Das Undbild by Kurt Schwitters (1919)

The complex scientific figure is kind of a cheat: no one would use that as a powerpoint slide. It's more of an attempt to make a complete map of metabolic pathways in human cells. I found it here: https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/b...

References:

The "someone else with a laptop distracts you" study is here:

Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24-31.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...

A good review of internal/external focus in motor learning is here:

Wulf, G. (2013). Attentional focus and motor learning: a review of 15 years. International Review of sport and Exercise psychology, 6(1), 77-104. http://gwulf.faculty.unlv.edu/wp-cont...

Seductive details is a large research topic, but here's a recent meta-analysis that tries to synthesize the existing studies:

Sundararajan, N., & Adesope, O. (2020). Keep it coherent: A meta-analysis of the seductive details effect. Educational Psychology Review, 32(3), 707-734. https://link.springer.com/article/10....

The "thinking 'are these the same or different'" example I drew from the literature on blocked and interleaved practice, which suggests that paying attention to similarities and paying attention to differences offers different affordances in category learning. See pages 2-3 in the following piece.

Carvalho, P. F., & Goldstone, R. L. (2014). Putting category learning in order: Category structure and temporal arrangement affect the benefit of interleaved over blocked study. Memory & cognition, 42(3), 481-495. https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/papers/bl...

Good advice on reducing extraneous cognitive load in undergraduate science courses comes is here (with a couple of other good references in there):

https://cwsei.ubc.ca/sites/default/fi...

Some interesting research on cell phones and attention is here:

Thornton, B., Faires, A., Robbins, M., & Rollins, E. (2014). The mere presence of a cell phone may be distracting: Implications for attention and task performance. Social Psychology, 45(6), 479. https://oarklibrary.com/file/2/0c907a...

On manipulating student attention towards (or away from) deep structure, see (this is also where the clown image comes from):

Schwartz, D. L., Chase, C. C., Oppezzo, M. A., & Chin, D. B. (2011). Practicing versus inventing with contrasting cases: The effects of telling first on learning and transfer. Journal of educational psychology, 103(4), 759. http://ece.neu.edu/edsnu/mcgruer/USC/...