Types of Attention
Attention is not a single construct but a family of related capacities. Cognitive neuroscience distinguishes at least five distinct attention systems:
Sustained attention—the capacity to maintain focus on a continuously demanding task over time. This is what fails when you read the same paragraph repeatedly without comprehension.
Selective attention—the capacity to focus on relevant information while suppressing irrelevant distractions. This is what allows you to hold a conversation in a noisy restaurant.
Divided attention—the capacity to distribute cognitive resources across multiple tasks simultaneously. This is what fails spectacularly when multitasking.
Alerting—the capacity to achieve and maintain a state of high readiness to respond. This explains why caffeine improves performance on vigilance tasks.
Executive attention—the capacity to engage top-down control over attention allocation, overriding bottom-up capture. This is the most trainable and the most relevant to complex cognitive performance.
Sustained Attention Training
Vigilance tasks—continuous performance tests that require monitoring for rare signals—provide the primary laboratory measure of sustained attention. Research on vigilance performance has identified several trainable components:
The classic vigilance decrement refers to performance declining over time on monitoring tasks, even when task demands remain constant. Warm and metas (1978) documented that this decrement is steeper when signals are infrequent and the task is boring—suggesting that task design and motivation modulate the decline.
Studies of air traffic controllers, nuclear power plant operators, and surveillance personnel show that sustained attention capacity varies substantially across individuals and can be improved with specific training protocols. Bakan (1959) found that practicing vigilance tasks improved not just performance on the practiced task but generalized to novel vigilance situations.
Computerized attention training programs like Captain's Log and BrainTrain have shown improvements on standard attention measures after 30-40 hours of training spread over several weeks. However, effect sizes are typically modest (d = 0.3-0.5) and transfer to non-trained attention measures is inconsistent.
Mindfulness-Based Attention Training
Mindfulness meditation has received substantial research attention as an attention training method. The standard mindfulness intervention—mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)—involves 8 weeks of training in focused attention on breath and body sensations, with instructions to notice when attention has wandered and gently return to the focus.
Mrazek and colleagues (2012) conducted a particularly rigorous study with MBA students. After just two weeks of mindfulness training (45 minutes per day), participants showed measurable improvements in GRE reading comprehension scores and working memory capacity. Critically, improvements were mediated by reduced mind-wandering during the test—mindfulness training appeared to strengthen the capacity to sustain attention on the task at hand.
Hölzel and colleagues (2011) used MRI to document structural brain changes following mindfulness training. After 8 weeks of MBSR training, participants showed increased gray matter density in the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and temporal-parietal junction—regions associated with attention, learning, and memory. These changes were absent in wait-list control groups.
Jha and colleagues (2010) compared mindfulness training with different populations: experienced meditators, novices undergoing MBSR, and a control group. During the intensive training period, novices showed increased prefrontal cortex activity during an attention task, suggesting compensatory recruitment of attentional control resources. Experienced meditators showed decreased activation—suggesting they had achieved greater efficiency.
MacLean and colleagues (2010) found that just 5 days of 20-minute meditation sessions produced measurable improvements in visual sustained attention (the " Eagle" task). The meditation group showed a 400% improvement in perceptual stability compared to control groups—suggesting that even brief training can produce significant effects.
Working Memory Training: The Evidence
Working memory training—particularly the n-back task popularized by cognitive training companies—promises improvements in fluid intelligence through sustained practice on working memory demands. The n-back task requires indicating when the current stimulus matches the stimulus from n steps back in the sequence.
The initial promise was substantial. Jaeggi and colleagues (2008) reported that just 17-19 days of n-back training produced improvements in fluid intelligence (Raven's matrices) that exceeded the improvement from working memory capacity itself. This finding suggested that working memory training might produce genuine transfer to general cognitive ability.
However, subsequent research has significantly complicated this picture. A meta-analysis by Melby-Lervåg and Hulme (2013) examined 23 studies of working memory training and concluded that improvements were limited to tasks closely related to the training itself with no transfer to nonverbal ability, verbal ability, or academic achievement. The authors concluded that claims of far transfer were "not supported by evidence."
Shipstead and colleagues (2012) found that after controlling for practice effects and publication bias, the magnitude of training gains decreased substantially, and evidence for transfer to complex cognition was weak. Their analysis suggested that working memory training improves performance on working memory tasks but does not fundamentally change the capacity constraints that limit working memory performance.
A critical distinction emerged in the literature: near transfer (improvement on tasks similar to training) versus far transfer (improvement on substantially different cognitive tasks). Working memory training reliably produces near transfer but far transfer remains controversial.
Honest Critiques of Cognitive Training
The cognitive training industry—worth billions of dollars annually—has been criticized extensively by cognitive scientists for overstating evidence. The Federal Trade Commission took action against Lumosity in 2016, requiring the company to cease making claims that weren't substantiated by scientific evidence.
The "far transfer" problem represents the core scientific challenge. Making you better at the n-back task is trivial—you should get better with practice. Making you better at reasoning, creativity, or real-world problem-solving through cognitive training is the valuable claim—and the evidence for this remains weak.
However, blanket dismissal may be premature. Research by Basak and colleagues (2008) found that after 23 sessions of Real Warfare game training, older adults (60-85 years) showed improvements on both trained and untrained attention measures, with gains maintained at 3-month follow-up. This suggests that training that engages multiple attention systems simultaneously, rather than isolated components, may be more likely to produce generalization.
Simons and colleagues (2016) proposed a framework distinguishing "useful" cognitive training from implausible claims. Useful training involves deliberate practice on well-specified cognitive operations with feedback. Implausible claims involve vague promises of general cognitive enhancement without mechanistic support. The distinction matters for evaluating specific programs.
Practical Protocols
Translating research into practice requires distinguishing evidence-based approaches from overhyped claims:
Mindfulness meditation (strongest evidence): Start with 10-15 minutes daily of focused attention on breath. When attention wanders, notice and return. Progressively extend duration. After 8-12 weeks of consistent practice, expect measurable improvements in sustained attention and working memory. Apps like Headspace and Calm provide structured guidance but any consistent practice appears effective.
Vigilance training (moderate evidence): Sustained attention improves with practice on demanding monitoring tasks. Video games requiring sustained visual search—like real-time strategy games—have shown attention benefits. Research by Green and Bavelier (2003) found that action video game players showed superior visual attention and that training on action games improved attention in non-players.
Working memory training (limited transfer): If your goal is improved working memory task performance, n-back training will achieve that goal. If your goal is improved reasoning or academic performance, evidence for working memory training is weak. Choose the intervention that matches your actual goal.
Attention across the lifespan: Attention capacities naturally decline with age but can be maintained through active use. Salthouse (1996) estimated that engagement in cognitively demanding activities moderates age-related decline by approximately 40%. The critical factor may be sustained engagement with challenging tasks rather than any specific training program.