Development of Attention

Second Year of Life

During this stage, with maturation and growth process of the nervous system the child develops more ability to inhibit and ignore stimuli and begins to be able to concentrate for a period of time on a concrete task of its own choice. The attention is completely rigid and inflexible and the effort involved in maintaining attention to the chosen stimuli has to be totally cut out i.e. no distraction can be tolerated.

Third Year of Life

This stage is similar to stage 2; he can still only attend to one task at a time. However, while in stage 2 the child can only attend to one activity at a time, now the attention is more flexible. The child can shift his attention by only stopping what he is doing and locking attention to the next activity. This type of attention is called single channel attention.

• Single channel attention In this theory, the capacity for information processing is considered to be fixed - a single undifferentiated resource - in the extreme case, a single information channel, one and only one stimulus-response operation at a time.

Fourth Year of Life

The child’s attention is still single channel; but he is in charge of his own focus of attention. So if an adult interferes while he is doing a task, he will willingly stop-switch his attention to the adult-listen-then move his attention back to the task.

Fifth Year of Life

• Two-channel attention  the child can attend to outside stimuli whilst continuing with a task, i.e. he can listen while doing etc. in the early stages this integrated attention only lasts for short periods but gradually these periods lengthen. The child is not ready for the classroom until he has reached the two channel attention.

• Integrated attention So we develop through these stages until, in our prime we reach the peak of our ability to attend in a fully integrated and controlled way. However, it is important to emphasize that the stages are not mutually exclusive. We do not necessarily function at the peak of our abilities, but our ability to attend varies from minute to minute, task to task, and circumstances to circumstances. Increasing age is accompanied by gradual loss of skills and actions cease to be automatic. Thus, we tend to regress back through the stages.

The further up the child gets in schools the greater are the demands on attention. The child would be expected to take notes while the teacher is talking, which would be an impossible task unless the child’s attention is totally integrated. It might also be that the same child’s attention differs in different circumstances.