Have you ever noticed that, when you are working on a tough homework assignment, the world shuts down around you? You become hyper-focused on the task in front of you that you barely register someone coughing a few feet away from you or the sound of music playing through your headphones. However, when you pull out your phone and start watching Tik Tok, suddenly every single noise is audible. The person talking loudly across the room, the sound of someone getting out of a chair, the person coughing from early, all of it begins to distract you from your daily doom scroll. Why is that? Well, you may be experiencing something called load theory of attention, and when it comes time to study for those college exams, it may be something you want to be aware of.
Music is an innately human practice. From the humming the song that is stuck in your head to walk out songs to specific life and cultural moments, such as the quinceanera or weddings, music can serve a variety of purposes. In a recent study, researchers found that over fifty percent of college students’ study and do other classwork while listening to music1. This largely due to music through platforms like Spotify making music much more accessible. Music is a powerful form of self-expression, but can music help you be better at school?
Many people have said that you must go to college to get the “college experience,”
which would open you up to new opportunities and material that would help fulfill your dreams in life.
Over the years I have recognized this fantasy and replaced it with a more “real” outlook on college.
Deadlines lurking around every corner,
A new assignment posted every hour,
A forgotten project pushed to crunch time.
In short, the college experience has been extremely overwhelming and tough, but there is no reason to fear it because there are many ways in which you can drastically increase your attention ability.
We will look at a particular psychological concept in this paper, that can improve your cognition and daily functioning [1], and help you grasp the most important information for studying. This concept is known as selective attention, and it works as our brain’s built-in thought filtration system.
Imagine, you’re getting prepared to study for your next exam. You have your textbook open, your notes are ready, but you’re watching a TikTok on your phone. Or maybe you have a Netflix show on in the background for some “background noise”. Does this scenario sound a little familiar?
It may feel like you’re being productive because you’re multitasking multiple things at the same time, but in reality, cognitive psychology says otherwise. You’re not actually multitasking; you’re performing something called divided attention and it might be the reason why your study sessions aren’t as useful as you expected them to be. Don’t worry though, in this post I will discuss what you can do to balance your study and TikTok time.
What is Divided Attention?
Divided attention occurs when you try to focus on more than one task at a time. It splits all your mental energy between multiple tasks, unlike focused attention, where all your mental energy goes to one task. Your brain isn’t designed to completely process multiple tasks at once. Instead, it switches between the tasks, resulting in something called the switching cost. The switching cost is when you lose time, make more errors, and overall remember less information [1]. Research shows that even small distractions, like your phone buzzing or music playing in the background, can affect how you store information in your memory [2]. This is true when it comes to studying, because the more divided your attention is, the harder it is to understand and remember the information you’re learning. So next time you think that multitasking will save time, remember that it’s most likely the opposite.
For first-year college students, the transition from high school to college can be challenging, especially when the ways of studying and learning begin to change. Luckily, there are beneficial ways of improving and overcoming these challenges if we understand the concept of load theory of attention. Do not fear, it is not as complicated as it may seem, and will change the way you think about studying!
Have you ever sat down to do homework, study, or to focus on a topic and realized that it is difficult to ignore distractions around you? Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to filter out distractions, even though you desire to be productive? At several points in a student’s academic career, most people often struggle with truly remaining focused while doing schoolwork and other important tasks. There can be many aspects of why a student cannot stay focused, especially if they are preoccupied with other events in their life.
What is Selective Attention?
One main reason that students can become so easily distracted is that selective attention is an obstacle that every student faces. Selective Attention is the process of having an ability to focus on a particular subject in their direct environment for a specific amount of time. For a student to be truly productive with their work, they must put in effort with this process and actively ignore all other distractions around their working environment. For this process to be a success, a person must be selective in their own attention and realize what they must drown out in the background. For a lot of young people, it can be a challenging task to drown out distractions such as their phones or other technology that is not helpful to be used in the moment.
While studying, everyone has experienced the need to snap back others, listen to music, and browse Instagram. We laugh when we communicate with others, we groove to music, and we stay connected when we browse Instagram. We run the risk of drifting from our study goals when we engage in these activities while studying. It is all fun and games until we get a bad grade on that important test or the homework assignment that is half of the final grade. I understand how difficult it might be to resist temptation when your phone is so close. I find myself picking up my phone to put on music or snap others back. But when I do this, I find that I start singing along to the music, which diverts my attention from my studies. Why is this a task so hard to complete? Divided attention, or multitasking, is the term used to describe this. When this occurs, I typically end up with a low grade or find it difficult to respond to an important quiz question. This causes an excessive amount of worry and self-doubt.
Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and iHeartRadio are all amazing apps created to provide people, from anywhere, music at any time. Music provides everyone with a sense of feeling all different kinds of moods and can be listened to for whatever occasion. Some people want to dance around their kitchen, while others just want to scream a breakup song in the privacy of their cars. Finally, what my friend and I like to do is carpool to karaoke. However, some people find themselves listening to music while they are studying. I know I am no saint when it comes to watching YouTube videos or streaming Hulu while I am studying for tests or writing a paper. I mean, it is impossible not to when my phone is right there. However, whatever I might be listening to while studying or writing a paper, I often find myself being very distracted and end up procrastinating on my assignment. I always stress about my grade, so I know I should focus on the task in hand. However, I always get stuck on what is happening on social media right now, or, depending on the song, I will just start to sing my heart out and not even care about my assignment anymore. Why, why is this a difficult task to do? Well, the answer is the result of divided attention, or more well-known name, multitasking.
Do you often have trouble studying for exams? Does it seem like even though you put in countless hours studying that you can never remember what you need to when it comes time to sit down and actually take a test? You may be studying wrong.
THE LOAD THEORY OF ATTENTION
The load theory of attention explains how people can focus on a certain task while ignoring irrelevant stimuli. This theory includes two concepts, processing capacity and perceptual load. Processing capacity refers to the limited amount of information a person can focus on at one time. Your working memory can only handle so much at a time and still successfully carry out a task. Perceptual load refers to the amount of information a particular task involves. A high-load task, involving a large amount of information, will fill up your entire processing capacity. A low-load task, dealing with a small amount of information, will only take up a small portion of the processing capacity (1). In other words, a difficult task will require all of your attention to perform, while an easier task leaves room for distractions to take over your attention.
As college students have you ever really thought of the most productive vs least productive ways to study and retain information? Trust me, we’re all in the same boat in one way or another. While adjusting to the college workload it can be stressful to find what works for you. What is important to note is trying to do several tasks at once is harmful to a student’s ability to learn and study information. If there’s one thing I would’ve liked to been told when I was an incoming freshman trying to learn all of this for myself – it would’ve been the greater amount or load of things you put on yourself and try to learn, will actually just hinder your ability to succeed. Dual-task methodology can help explain the reasoning behind this.
