ELearning/Course building/Managing learner attention
The following is a reprint from Wilcoxon, K. (2008). Do I have your attention? Design practices help learners engage. [1]
| The other day I was viewing an online tutorial for creating tweens in HTML5. The narration stopped, I looked at the screen, and a fill-in-the-blank question was staring at me. It then hit me that I had no idea how to respond, and worse, I had little recollection of the content I had just seen and heard. What happened? Whether it was something on my mind or something out the window, I was clearly not paying attention. And whose fault was this? Probably mine. But I also wonder if there was something about the tutorial that failed to keep my attention. As a designer, am I also guilty of failing to keep the learner’s attention? I hope not. |
The problem with attention
Attention is “focusing mental resources on relevant features in the environment” — instruction being the relevant feature in our case. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t capture the dynamic nature of attention. Our attention system, if you will, has several components operating at various levels of consciousness. Aldous Huxley (1954) referred to this system as the "reducing valve." The most primitive and automatic component provides continuous scanning of the environment — scouting for the unusual, and notifying our conscious mind when it detects something different. We call this “back-of-mind” attention, based on sensual perception and peripheral awareness.
Next, a gateway mechanism operates to dampen the scanning component by blocking its signals to the conscious brain (attentional gating). This gateway is best at blocking familiar sights and sounds, allowing the unfamiliar free passage. As the gateway grows accustomed to this new stimulus, a process of habituation occurs and blockage becomes stronger. However, the stronger the incoming signal, the less effective the gateway serves its purpose. We’ve all experienced the difficulty of ignoring a honking car alarm.
The highest order of attention is “front-of-mind” concentration, variously called executive or selective attention, working memory, and focus. It is front and center, and has limited processing capacity — 7 ± 2 items at once. Perceptual load research (Forster & Lavie, 2009) tells us that this capacity is constant and can be occupied by relevant and/or irrelevant external and internal stimuli. Increased or decreased task-relevant load, then, also factors into our distractibility. The lesson here is to maintain sufficient perceptual load so irrelevant stimuli is kept at bay. As an example, a series of experiments found a 153% increase in errors between discriminating stimuli presented an average of every 2.3 seconds, and then an average of every 10.3 seconds. Faster presentation rates and requiring higher response rates are two methods proven to increase task-relevant load.
Two additional dynamics of attention can provide us some guidance. First, attention is a process, acting in three different steps: disengage — move — engage. We must disengage our attention from wherever it was engaged, before we can move it to another part of the perceptual field. Without adequate opportunity to disengage before moving on, the old and new overlap, seriously degrading focus.
Finally, we know that more-or-less specialized centers in the brain process our different senses. Therefore, attention channels run in parallel rather than sequentially — multiprocessor, as opposed to single-channel. The visual and auditory channels have deservedly received the most attention, but touch, smell, the kinesthetic sense, and even temperature perception can also contribute. An example of this might be using your cursor to track your reading from the screen. The cursor provides a visual cue, but tactile and kinesthetic perception is also involved. This is all useful, because neurons that fire together wire together! The result is strengthened processing and memory (in other words, learning).
Attraction and distraction
With the brain’s attention system as a backdrop, consider what the most basic element of attraction and distraction might be: In a word, change. Our back-of-mind attention is constantly seeking out change, and is ready to speed the signal to front-of-mind awareness. We see that change can be friend or foe for the instructional designer, or anyone else trying to gain and maintain someone’s attention. For most people, the visual sense is predominant. Here, motion is the strongest attractor, including flashing on-off properties, followed by spatial location, contrast, color, and shape. We can note that motion is more powerful than fading (which is essentially a change in color). When viewers have to find an object characterized by a conjunction of properties, such as color and shape, perception becomes much slower and requires sequential processing. The same is true for object size. Attention spreads spatially over entire objects, thus attention to an important aspect of a larger object is more difficult than to a smaller object.
Perhaps a bit ironically, the consistency of cues also has a bearing on attention, in that attending is slower when stimuli appear in unexpected ways. Auditory attractors include tones and other sounds, plus the human voice. Tones are very useful in providing cues to disengage attention. When we speak, we use inflection, volume, pace, and tone of voice. For example, when we want to emphasize something, we might slow down, speak at lower volume, and include well-timed pauses to emphasize an important item. The modality principle says that people learn more deeply from multimedia lessons when audio narration (rather than on-screen text) explains graphics. We know this through research, but it is also apparent from a common-sense perspective.
Attention is sharper, deeper, and more distributed throughout the brain when multiple senses are involved. Not only are the senses working together to focus and maintain attention, there is also less back-of-mind attention available for distractions. Psychological factors that support or distract attention include several nuts-and-bolts matters. Expectancy can be a powerful attractor: The anticipation of something to come. Anyone who has watched “My House Is Worth What?” on HGTV, knows the power of expectancy to focus the mind. In contrast, anything that degrades perception is also distracting. Tightly spaced text is more difficult to read, as is a screen filled with text. And don’t get me started on fuzzy graphics and text. The same goes for soft or mumbling speech. Complex vocabulary and sentence structure, written or spoken, cause a drag on attention. Split attention, caused by the separation of related elements that you must process together for understanding, causes significant decline in learning. It also affects retrieval, more so as we age. The nature of the task is also important. Complex tasks, such as learning temporal order (processes and procedures), require greater attentional resources and strategic processing than memory for items. We know that complexity is more detrimental for novices, quickly leading to cognitive overload and extinguishing attention. These are external influences on attention, but we also need to pay attention to important internal factors.
We already know that mood, interest level, bodily comfort, and the like are important to attention and distraction, and that instructional designers have little control over them beyond using pleasing and stimulating delivery. However, designers can often predict the learner's mental state, to a certain extent, and thus can handle it.
“Tools are more than just something to make a task easier. They change your way of thinking, of approaching a task (and indeed the nature of the task itself), and can reap unimagined wider social changes.” This quote from Adam Joinson (2003) is referring to the Internet, and an important way in which the Internet has influenced us all in our "online behavior,” the actions and tendencies users demonstrate while using the Internet. Many writers have offered their ideas on this topic, so I will confine our attention to just a few of the more common behaviors.
Impatience is perhaps the most renowned characteristic of online users. Upwards of 75% of all households use wideband connections, with the vast majority saying they have little tolerance for telephone-based access. One piece of research says that there is a 30% loss rate for Web pages that take more than 30 seconds to load. Thirty seconds seems generous to me. Encouraging this impatience is a heightened sense of control that comes with the ability to move on at the click of a mouse. The anonymity of the Web makes it easier to move on when interest wanes, and with fewer social implications.
To summarize, there are many realities the successful instructional designer must account for when building learning environments. The designer must explicitly consider the construction of the brain, and its natural tendency to detect change and redirect attention. To avoid overlap and confusion, the brain must have sufficient opportunity to disengage attention, move, and reengage. Our brains process our senses in parallel — they can work cooperatively to focus attention, or conflictually vie for attention. The brain is best at perceiving and processing distinct differences in stimuli. Anything less requires additional resources, slowing focus and cognition. Both external and internal stimuli are constantly vying for attention. We can manage them by using attractors, and minimizing distractors. Social and psychological factors are very important to learning — we must meet certain basic needs so that learning can take center stage. Finally, technology changes us — the way we think, and the way we do things. According to author Franklin Foer (2017), "The problem is that we’re not just merging with our machines: We’re merging with the companies that operate those machines."
Attention and design
What does attention tell us about design? As I mentioned previously, looking at instructional design from the perspective of attention supports many usual practices, and it encourages us to consider additional ones. First, a quick rundown of methods we’re most familiar with:
- Yield control. Give learners maximum navigational control with asynchronous designs. For me, a structured path is always the default, but I give learners multiple ways to create their own direction. What’s the alternative — distract them by making them find loopholes in your controls?
- Minimize distractions by removing irrelevant visual and auditory elements.
- Use simple, concise exposition; don’t make learners work to understand you.
- Decrease visual density; avoid the cluttered look. (We concede that this wiki breaks this rule.)
- Use visual and auditory cues to focus attention. Keep the cues simple, though. Arrows, bullets, circles and the like are great, but don’t mix colors and shapes (e.g., blue and red arrows plus blue and red circles). As mentioned above, motion is a stronger attractor than fading in or out.
- Use speech to establish visual expectations prior to presenting the image. In other words, explain what learners will see or what to look for prior to presentation. (Peat, 2000).
- Use multiple modalities, especially when describing complex illustrations and processes. This is not only more efficient, but more effective too.
- Use repetition to reinforce important content.
There are several insights I gained from my look at attention, from very simple and specific, to general and all-encompassing. The easiest methods to implement include using silence or tones to signal learners to disengage from the prior content, and prepare for what’s coming next. The ideal length of the “gap” isn’t defined, but my experience tells me that a full second is about right. Active transitions, such as wipes, are useful for maintaining visual attention, but make them quick. On this, PowerPoint has the right idea. Complicated and flashy transitions are simply not effective. Their novelty drops to zero after a single use, and distract attention from the content.
Change the visual field in some manner more often. Of course, time the changes with the verbal content, but get in the habit of adding, subtracting, changing, or moving elements on a regular basis. Establish expectancy by using anticipatory cues (examples: empty bullets, progressive disclosure, and informing students of key points to come).
Standard desk- and laptop screen size has increased significantly over the past few years (from 14” diagonally in 2000 to 22” in 2013). Tablets range in size from 7” to 13”. Unless you do it for them, users will unconsciously separate large screens into sectors that they must process successively. Research has consistently found shorter line lengths, about 60-70 characters per line, increase reading speed and comprehension, and are preferred by online readers (Dyson & Haselgrove, 2001; Ling & van Schaik, 2006). Font type, on the other hand, does not appear to impact speed or comprehension, although san-serif type is preferred by most over serif.
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