Aim, filter, brake

Attention in plain words

Psychologists do not treat attention as one thing. It is a family of control processes that decide which information gets processed deeply and which responses get made. Three jobs recur in every account:

• Aiming: pointing your processing at a location, an object or a feature ("the centre arrow", "the item with four dots").
• Filtering: keeping irrelevant information from driving what you do, even when it is right next to what you want.
• Braking: stopping a response that is ready to go when the situation says it is wrong.

Adele Diamond's widely cited review of executive functions puts filtering and braking under one heading, inhibitory control, and splits it into response inhibition (self-control, not acting impulsively) and interference control (selective attention and cognitive inhibition).

Inhibitory control involves being able to control one's attention, behavior, thoughts, and/or emotions to override a strong internal predisposition or external lure, and instead do what's more appropriate or needed.

Akira Miyake and colleagues reached a similar picture from the other direction. Testing 137 students on many tasks, they found that inhibiting a prepotent response, shifting between tasks and updating working memory were "moderately correlated with one another, but are clearly separable". Attention and control are related skills, not one skill.

Three networks in the brain

The most influential brain-level account comes from Michael Posner and Steven Petersen. In 1990 they proposed that attention is carried out by separate networks, and in their 2012 update they summarised them like this:

• Alerting: achieving and keeping a ready state. It involves brain-stem arousal systems and right-hemisphere systems linked to sustained vigilance.
• Orienting: selecting a location or object, with parietal cortex among its key regions.
• Executive control: resolving conflict among thoughts, feelings and responses, involving the midline frontal cortex and anterior cingulate.

Jin Fan, Posner and colleagues built a single test to measure all three: the Attention Network Test, which combines a cued reaction-time task with an arrow flanker task. In 40 adults they found these average effects:

The most important finding was about independence. The correlations between the three network scores were tiny (.05 to .12) and none was significant. Someone can be quick to get ready and poor at resolving conflict, or the reverse. That is why our attention shelf has several different games instead of one.

Four ways you use attention

Textbooks often sort attention by how it is deployed over time and across tasks.

Selective attention is picking one source out of many: the one relevant line in a log file, your name called in a noisy canteen, the odd item in a Singularity grid.

Sustained attention (vigilance) is staying responsive over a long stretch when signals are rare. In Norman Mackworth's 1948 Clock Test, observers watched a pointer for a rare double jump; a 2025 review summarises the result as a steep drop in detection accuracy in the first 30 minutes of a two-hour watch, followed by a steadier decline. Vigilance is not relaxing: Joel Warm and colleagues concluded that it "requires hard mental work and is stressful".

Divided attention is doing two things at once. It usually means doing both worse. In David Strayer and William Johnston's driving-simulator study, phone conversations, handheld or hands-free, doubled the rate of missed traffic signals, while listening to the radio or an audiobook did not.

Switching is moving between tasks or rules. Stephen Monsell's review describes responses as "substantially slower and, usually, more error-prone immediately after a task switch", a cost that preparation reduces but does not remove.

Underneath all four is the pull of your own thoughts. In Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert's smartphone study of 2,250 adults, people's minds were wandering in 46.9 per cent of the moments sampled.

The four facets we measure

Our Attention dimension groups seven games into four facets. Each facet answers a different question about you.

Selective attention

Finding the relevant item among distractors, quickly and accurately. Singularity asks you to find the one odd item in a grid; Target Practice asks you to hit true targets moving among decoys.

Interference control

Acting on the relevant signal while nearby irrelevant signals push towards a different action. Arrows, our flanker task, measures how much conflicting arrows slow or mislead you.

Inhibition

Withholding or cancelling a response that is ready to go. Pulse is a go/no-go stream with stop signals; Keypress asks you to press fast inside open windows and stop the instant a window closes.

Perceptual precision

Making fine, fast judgements about what you perceive. Lengths asks which of two briefly shown lengths is longer; Timing Tasks asks you to reproduce time intervals accurately.

Arrows and Pulse carry the largest share of the dimension (22 per cent each), then Singularity (20), Target Practice (16), Lengths (10), and Keypress and Timing Tasks (5 each).

Speed is part of attention

Almost every attention measure involves time, because attention is partly about how fast the right process wins.

Your baseline. In a study of 1,469 adults aged 18 to 65, the average simple visual reaction time (press when a light appears) was 231 ms, or 213 ms after correcting for hardware delays, and it slowed by about half a millisecond per year of age. Choice tasks are slower: William Hick showed in 1952 that time grows as the number of possible choices rises, at a roughly constant rate of information gain. Try your own baseline here.

Practice drillSign in to try it

The trade-off. You can almost always buy speed with errors, or accuracy with time. Richard Heitz's review traces this speed-accuracy trade-off in species "from insects to rodents to primates". It is why a reaction time means little without the error rate beside it, and why our games report both.

Attention at study and at work

A few examples make the facets concrete.

• Selective attention: scanning a 200-row spreadsheet for the one row that does not reconcile; spotting the failing test in a wall of green build logs; finding the relevant clause in a long reading-comprehension passage.
• Interference control: answering a data-interpretation question while an attractive but wrong option sits right beside the correct one; coding while notifications flash in the corner of the screen.
• Inhibition: not hitting Send on an angry email; not marking the first answer that looks right in a timed test before reading the last option; not interrupting a client mid-sentence.
• Perceptual precision: noticing that two figures in a chart are 4 per cent apart, not 40; judging whether you have 30 or 90 seconds left on a section without checking the clock.
• Sustained attention: the 45th question of a two-hour exam, the last hour of a night shift monitoring a dashboard.

What to take from this lesson

• Attention is a family of control processes: aiming, filtering and braking.
• Posner and Petersen's alerting, orienting and executive networks are largely independent, so one attention score cannot capture you.
• Selective, sustained, divided and switching attention describe how attention is deployed; divided attention usually means worse performance on both tasks.
• Our four facets are selective attention, interference control, inhibition and perceptual precision, measured by seven games.
• Speed and accuracy trade off, so always read one alongside the other.

Next, the lesson What attention predicts looks at the evidence on how these skills relate to exam, study and job outcomes.

Sources

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3. Posner, M. I., & Petersen, S. E. (1990). The attention system of the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13, 25–42. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ne.13.030190.000325
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