Attention

Attention represents a neuro-psychological process that concentrates a person's mental activity in a particular direction. Attention is usually accompanied by adaptation of the entire organism for the best possible perception of certain irritations and the most precise response to them, which is called a set or working posture. For example, a person intensely focused on some noise becomes alert: turns their head toward it, sometimes stretches their entire body, stops moving in order not to create interference, and if the noise threatens danger, prepares for defensive actions or flight. Former psychology identified attention with the 'clear field of consciousness.' Just as in the field of vision there is a place for clear or central vision and zones of less clear, or peripheral, vision, it was believed that in consciousness there are more clear and less clear experiences. According to former psychology, 'clarity of consciousness' is determined by apperception, i.e., depends on the influence of all previous states, formed representations or groups of representations (W. Wundt). Modern psychology expands the concept of attention, considering it as a direction not only of conscious but of all the organism's active activity in general. Based on Pavlov's teaching of conditioned reflexes, it must be recognized that the basis of attention is a certain relationship between nerve centers with different levels of excitation. Research by Sherrington, and in our country by A. Ukhtomsky, showed that of the mass of irritations affecting the organism, most remain without result and only a few cause responsive movements. The final reaction goes in one direction or another depending on the relative excitation of the centers. At the same time, the same irritation, depending on a series of simultaneous and preceding nerve processes, can cause either one or another reaction, and sometimes even directly opposite reactions. A. Ukhtomsky assumes that in the central nervous system dominant 'foci of excitation' are created, which draw the energy of the organism to themselves and inhibit all extraneous excitations. Only thanks to such foci of excitation, or 'dominants,' is the closure of a conditioned reflex possible, is all our activity possible, is the choice between irritations and the direction of our reactions possible, subjectively perceived by us as the activity of attention. Thus, the dominant is the physiological basis of attention. The conditions for the emergence of attention can be reduced to three large groups. Attention depends, first, on the intensity of irritation: any strong sound, bright light attracts our attention. However, even a weak irritation does attract attention if it corresponds to a certain organic state (for example, hunger). Attention therefore depends, secondly, on correspondence with our internal state. This is connected with the third group of conditions-dependence of attention on previously established connections, on all our previous experience, determined by social conditions. If the first two groups cause involuntary attention, then attention caused by the latter reasons and more complex in its psycho-physiological mechanism is called voluntary. It arises on the basis of involuntary attention, similar to how conditioned reflexes arise on the basis of unconditioned ones. It plays a colossal role in our lives, as it allows us to suppress temporary and private interests in favor of more permanent and general interests, allows us to coordinate individual needs with social ones; by creating conditions for the excitation of new foci, it organizes all human behavior. The effect of attention is expressed in increased sensitivity: the threshold of irritation is lowered during attention, and we notice irritations that we would not notice without attention. On the other hand, the effect of attention is reflected in the change in the nature of our reactions: its direction toward movement causes acceleration and strengthening (motor reaction); direction toward irritation causes slowing and weakening of the reaction (sensory reaction). The volume of attention in tachistoscopic experiments is expressed as 3 to 5 simultaneously perceived irritations, both visual and auditory. However, experiments with complication showed that irritations from different areas, for example, auditory and visual, cannot be perceived simultaneously; first one irritation is perceived, and then another. Accordingly, a distinction is made between concentrated attention, completely absorbed in one irritation, one process, and distributive attention, i.e., distributed over several irritations, several tasks. Experiments show that both types of attention can be cultivated. While reading, one can distinguish between fixing attention and wandering attention. Attention is accompanied by changes in breathing; intensified attention causes weakening and slowing of breathing, which is also reflected in the vasomotor rhythm. The stability of attention depends on the strength and duration of excitation, therefore, on the intensity of irritation and previous connections determining its strength and course, i.e., mainly on acquired experience, on social causes. Experiments showed that the duration of attention directed at one process is measured not in seconds, but in minutes, even tens of minutes. The rapid transition of attention from one process to another, the tempo of attention also has its limits, depending on both individuality and upbringing. The degree of attention can vary-it can be more or less deep, just as the inhibition of extraneous excitations can vary-the intensity of attention. Distractibility of attention depends on the strength of secondary, subdominant excitations; experiments show that irritations that are variable, uneven, non-monotonic have the greatest distracting power. The connection of attention with instincts, emotions and interests is extremely close and should be clear from the conditions of attention. Attention is the process that unites human activity into a single whole, the process of processing all excitations, as a result of which a person at each given moment manifests himself in a holistic act of behavior as a single organism.

H. Dorynpin.

Disorders of Attention. For states of fatigue, the so-called distractibility is characteristic, i.e., the inability to maintain prolonged voluntary attention in one direction: with every attempt to concentrate, a person quickly tires, slipping into fragmented thinking not determined by voluntary effort. Weakness of attention in schizophrenics has much in common with this type of disorder, but also has a number of features unique to it. Schizophrenics often complain of states of complete absence of thought that suddenly arise during goal-directed thinking, during conversation, while reading, etc., usually lasting for a short time but recurring at very short intervals. Such states of alternating paralysis of voluntary attention, called attentional blocks (Sperrungen), lead to the inability to productively engage in any mental work. Essentially, the same mechanism underlies the negativistic avoidance of attention concentration observed in stuporous catatonics: patients, while clearly perceiving what is happening around them, nevertheless, although independently of their will, offer stubborn resistance to the directing influence of external impressions on their thoughts and actions. In such cases, one sometimes speaks of a block of voluntary (active) attention with preservation (or even enhancement) of involuntary (passive) attention. Attentional blocks similar to those described mostly also extend to their physiological components, such as accompanying changes in pupil size, direction of gaze, pulse, respiration, etc., which are absent even in situations that sharply threaten and cause a natural defensive reaction in any healthy person. The weakness of voluntary attention in schizophrenics, however, sometimes has a somewhat different meaning: namely, it resembles the distractibility of people completely absorbed in one subject and, therefore, not paying attention to anything else—narrow attention span (autistic self-absorption, see Autism). Hallucinations have a significant distracting effect on attention not only in schizophrenia but also in other diseases. Less significant are the cases most often observed in schizophrenia where attention is as if forcibly fixed on certain things. In other cases, it must passively follow every new stimulus, being completely unable to voluntarily determine its direction. The latter disorder, when attention loses its independence and is entirely at the mercy of randomly changing external impressions, is observed in various psychoses, especially in gross organic diseases on the one hand, and in infectious states of mental weakness on the other. The mechanism of attention disorder in patients with manic-depressive psychosis is completely different from that in schizophrenia, although the attitude toward external impressions, e.g., of depressive patients, at first glance very much resembles the picture of schizophrenic attentional block. The similarity here, however, is purely external; in reality, instead of a block, there is inhibition (Hemmung); patients have neither a negativistic set nor states of attention paralysis occurring in separate bursts, but all mental processes are uniformly impaired, including the ability to follow external impressions: in this case, although their attention is unable to correctly fix the phenomena of surrounding reality, their behavior expresses full readiness for it, accordingly to which facial expression and eye expression often betray the painful suffering from inability to concentrate. In manic patients, inhibition is replaced by heightened liveliness of attention, which, on the one hand, quickly notes every new phenomenon, and on the other hand, is extremely easily distracted from one impression to another, due to which the thread of thought is lost. Increased distractibility of attention is characteristic not only of maniacs but also of excited organic patients, e.g., of expansive paralytics, in whom, however, at the same time, circular liveliness and observance are completely absent. Among other disorders of attention, it is necessary to mention its blunting in organic brain diseases associated with the development of more or less profound dementia (e.g., in progressive paralysis). In these cases, attention suffers due to the weakening of interests: general spiritual impoverishment destroys the impulses for fixing impressions of the external world, while simultaneously making it difficult to form associations between these impressions and the patient's past experience. Therefore, the most stunning events may unfold before the eyes of a demented paralytic without disturbing the state of dull indifference in which he finds himself—and this even in cases when the patient still retains the ability to understand elementary phenomena of his surrounding life. In less profound and not so rapidly developing states of dementia (also in oligophrenics), dullness is sometimes not the primary feature, but rather narrowness of attention, i.e., the inability to distribute it among different objects, the consequence of which is the inability to sort out a more or less complex situation.