Attention Game: Stroop

This game is a variation on the famous Stroop effect. It's a fun way to test your ability to focus while processing information.

It will train you to focus, improve your concentration, and pay attention.

Attention and Age

As we get older the challenges associated with inattentiveness grow. Deteriorating visual attention can affect behavior, such our ability to read or drive.

"As people age, they experience changes in how they perceive the information that their eyes and ears gather from the environment. Specifically, older adults combine information from the different senses more readily than do younger adults. This tendency, known as sensory integration, can lead to difficulties in blocking out distracting sights and sounds while still maintaining focus on important information."
- Paul Laurienti, M.D., Ph.D

How Attention Works

Reading comprehension involves significant attention, focus, and concentration. Practice can increase our alertness and awareness.

Attention is related to emotion and their intensity of those emotions. The more a person feels interested in what someone is saying and the less she feels interested in other conversations in a room, the more intensively attention is concentrated on the conversation at hand. The more one is interested in what one happens to see on the street and the less in what someone is telling us from the passenger’s seat, the less it induces failures of visual attention during simulated driving. Although it may seem hard to maintain attention research has shown that the inability to pay attention sometimes leads to boredom, rather than the other way around.

“Our early data suggest that attention training is indeed a way to reduce older adults’ susceptibility to distracting stimuli and improve concentration.”
- Jennifer Mozolic

How can I improve my attention?

Being disorganized, and unable to perform well because of a lack of attention is frustrating. Keep your brain performing at its best helps us cope with everyday live and make us happier people.

Findings from the Improvement in Memory Plasticity-Based Adaptive Cognitive Training (IMPACT) study show that 77% of participants who completed the 8-week Brain Fitness Program (Posit Science, San Francisco, California) reported benefits in everyday life activities such as remembering shopping lists. (February 18, 2009) http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/588402

Try and do tasks that require your full attention. For example try writing out the entire times table as fast as you can. Or if you are more creatively inclined like me go to the park with a pencil and paper and draw the people walking by as fast as you can. It's really hard work but I enjoy the results and I am getting better all the time.