DIRECTED ATTENTION AND THE OPEN WORKPLACE

My company's "Workplace of the Future" office layout

Last week I was on a conference call via my computer headset at my desk, a common “multi-tasking” activity that allows me to continue working when the conversation doesn’t involve me. However, my office that day was particularly boisterous and a client on the call asked if I could shut my conference room door. Embarrassed, I immediately muted my speaker and continued to listen in. Yet, I found it increasingly difficult to follow the conversation because of the noise of several other conversations going on in the office. I cupped my hands around my ears to press the headphones closer and drown out the noise, but it was no use. A few minutes later, our Human Resources Manager stopped by to introduce a new hire, but I pointed to my headphones and mouthed that I was on a call so that she understood why I couldn’t answer. Between the distractions and the noise, I became frustrated and upset by my inability to do this simple task, a phone call, from my desk and cursed our “Workplace of the Future” open office environment for draining my ability to pay attention.

Few years ago the company I work for, an Architecture and Engineering firm, rolled out a new design concept for re-thinking our office space which it called “Workplace of the Future.” Following the lead of tech companies, this concept involved a more visually open workplace where employees sat next to each other in a bench arrangement rather than being cordoned off into offices or cubicles. Our individual work stations also got smaller in size which was justified by providing more collaboration space such as formal and informal meeting rooms. The intent was that by reducing physical barriers and personal space, employees would be encouraged to collaborate more and exchange ideas. However, this environment also has serious repercussions related to employee’s directed attention and overall morale.

Directed Attention is the mental effort exerted to focus attention and manage our thoughts. The opposite of Voluntary Fascination which is intrinsic and automatic, directed attention requires real energy and mental resources which are depleted as they are used. Our modern workplace requires directed attention whenever we do something that isn’t inherently fascinating, which unfortunately is more often than not the bulk of one’s time. Especially when you consider that modern workplaces require us to be productive for an almost continuous 9 hours a day (depending on whether you are the minority that takes lunch breaks), this is a seriously draining environment for our mental processes.

However, I argue that the open workplace exacerbates the level of effort needed to achieve even the most basic tasks, as it creates more distractions by limiting barriers to noise and encouraging casual conversations. Without having a private office door, it also limits the ability for individuals to signal to others when they are available to talk and when they aren’t. Thus, it is all too easy for a colleague to stop by your desk when they happen to be walking by, or even just make a passing comment about something on your computer screen, and create a distraction that mentally pulls one away from their work. Introverts or those with attention disorders likely find this environment particularly taxing. Short of working exclusively from a conference room, one is forced to deal with an onslaught of audible and visual stimuli beckoning your attention away from the task that already involves considerable effort to focus on. The brain must use considerable effort to suppress this stimulus by inhibiting the brain’s attention mechanisms. The result of overusing this mental effort is Directed Attention Fatigue (DAF) where one is unable to focus and performance drops while irritability and frustration increases. All of which are undesirable consequences for employee productivity and morale.

In summary, while the open “Workplace of the Future” model has admirable goals for improving employee collaboration, it has inadvertently hurt worker productivity by creating an environment that taxes the ability for employees to focus. Thus, a new model for workplace design should incorporate the findings of Behavioral Psychology to provide quiet, private places for employees to focus on tasks while still providing the option to seek out areas for collaboration. I can only hope that my “Workplace of the Future” has a very short future before the next evolution of design thinking catches up to science.

Attention Span and Directed Attention: Losing to Goldfish and the 10 Minute Rule

"You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish." Headlines like this one from TIME magazine, or similar ones from the New York Times, Huffington Post, and The Telegraph in the UK make you wonder at first if it’s really true. This catchy line came from a study conducted by Microsoft based on multimedia users’ performance on online games paired with monitoring brain activity. According to the study, humans’ attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to now a mere 8 seconds; a goldfish supposedly has an attention span of 9 seconds. And it gets better: Microsoft claims that despite our fleeting attention in an increasingly digital world, the upside is that humans are getting better at multitasking and filtering through information due to the massive influx of information we have to process. Fortunately, about as soon as these articles came out, the science and research community quickly responded.

As I did my own wading through of online evidence from mythbusting (yes, The Discovery Channel did bust this!), to blogs from the scientific community, to passionate writers, it was hard to find any concrete consensus on this specific issue. Yet based on the literature we’ve read this term, I was already inclined to believe that there was something seriously fishy with this study. Besides questionable methods and cause vs. correlation error, there seemed to be a problem with conflating the role of memory and attention — the ability to recall information over the short or long term is not the same as focusing. Related concepts from our class include directed attention and fascination, which have clearly demonstrated that our attention capacity is a finite resource (James 1892; Kaplan 1978) and our inability to multitask effectively is non-negotiable, particularly with our many digital devices (Ophir et al. 2009). But how finite is directed attention? And what is the link to attention span?

In a chapter titled “Attention” in Brain Rules by John Medina (2008), we learn that humans actually have about a 10-minute attention limit, but stories and emotion can help keep an audience engaged for much longer in between 10 minute chunks. In other words, our directed attention seems to exist in these short segments as well. When we have to focus on something like a lecture or a long reading, we are most attentive for the first 10 minutes before we start to lose concentration.

This theory also appeals to attention restoration theory in interesting ways. Medina describes stories and appealing to emotion as helpful lifelines when attention is fading; and when thinking about the aspects of fascination and how our ancestors built mental models, there is a certain power to emotion and stories that makes a lot of sense. It’s as if these affective injections or brief tangents at 10 minute markers allow directed attention to rest momentarily while a kind of fascination kicks in. Still, this leads me to other questions concerning how attention works: Can emotion come from an excitement to learn or does it need to be based in first-hand experience? Also, do stories sometimes serve as distractions or force us to keep track of multiple strands of thought? I like the idea of stopping every 10 minutes, but I would imagine it requires a certain discipline for the person in charge to create a consistent, logical pattern for lectures.

All of this makes me wonder about why so much of our education system is still built around relatively long lectures and presentations. What if all lectures were limited to 10 minutes? Or what if one lecture was broken into smaller lectures with activities in between? It seems like educators could better leverage "task switching" and "being away" as a method for attention restoration, letting students process and work through material a little bit at a time before tackling a new concept. Flipped classrooms and active learning seem like promising techniques, but those tend to focus on ways of engaging students rather than on attention fatigue and attention restoration. To capitalize on opportunities in the classroom, I feel there should be more emphasis on how attention works, rather than putting the ownership on students to find better ways to pay attention and on teachers to design their most compelling lecture for each class. 


Surely if attention and focus are essential for learning, and our learning environments are not compatible for meeting our needs, we need to do something differently. This environment could be conceptual or even physical. Perhaps we need new lesson plans or in fact outdoor classrooms are the best place to learn. Any strategy gets even more complicated when we think about the vast variety among learning differences, diagnosed attention weaknesses and hyperactivity, and inconsistent educational training. So whether or not we can focus longer than a goldfish, it seems like there is an important take-away in making those ten minutes really count.


- Katie Williamson

Resources:

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/05/17/human-attention-spans-now-lower-than-a-goldfish-microsoft-study/
2. http://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/
3. http://www.brainrules.net/pdf/brainrules_summaries.pdf
4. James, W. (1892). Psychology: The Briefer Course. (Collier, 1962), Ch 13 - Attention (pp. 84-105).

5. Kaplan, S. (1978). Attention and Fascination: The Search for Cognitive Clarity. In S. Kaplan and R. Kaplan (Eds.) Humanscape. (pp. 84-90).

6. Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
7. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/education/teaching-professors-to-become-better-teachers.html

Paying Attention, Fast and Slow

To prepare myself for a summer internship in consumer insights, I was recommended the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. The entirety of the book focuses on two systems of thinking: System 1 and System 2. According to Kahneman:

• "System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little to no effort and no sense of voluntary control"
• "System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it"

Now this sounds very familiar to the concept that humans have two modes of attention: involuntary fascination and directed attention. I drew the conclusion that Kahneman's theory of consumer psyche must have been influenced not only by his own research, but by the early work in cognitive psychology on attention. Combining the two has lead to a deeper understanding of the subject.

System 1 i.e. involuntary fascination is our preferred mode of operating. It requires little to no skill beyond what has been programmed into our brains for survival: recognition, fear, learning our whereabouts. We are physically and mentally rested when operating in involuntary fascination mode. Kahneman brings up driving a car on an empty road as an example of when involuntary fascination is in use. 

System 2 i.e. directed attention not only mentally fatigues, it physically fatigues. When a situation requires a greater mental effort, we physically react by having our heart rate increase, muscles tense and pupils dilate. No wonder Kahneman describes this system as "lazy". We will only use it when it is demanded of us from a particular scenario. In contrast to the example for System 1, Kahneman uses the example of overtaking a truck on a narrow road. Directed attention kicks into gear because we cannot perform without it. 

I found two interesting takeaways from combining Kahneman's book with this past week's topic of attention.

First, the fact that we innately understand that there are two modes of attention, even prior to being exposed to the required reading for this past week of NRE 560 lectures. Going back to the example of driving, think of your most recent road trip as a passenger. When the drive had a hair raising moment, did you find yourself taking a pause in conversation? Did you turn the music down? This is because you knew the driver was experiencing a moment of fatiguing directed attention and did not have the mental energy to focus on anything else. 

The second requires you to watch the video below:

As discussed in lectures, directed attention enables the blocking out of distractions. The gorilla test is an example of how easily we completely abandon involuntary attention for as simple of a task as counting. It's an important observation to know that when we do engage in directed attention, the rest of our surroundings can fade to black. Going full circle back to human evolution, directed attention puts us in danger, hence why the mental fatigue it creates has evolved for our survival. 

The Use of Attention in "Red" (1994) 

"Red" (1994) is one of three films in the "Three Colors" trilogy directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski between 1993-94. The same year, the Academy Awards nominated "Red" for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director. "Red," "White," "Blue" are colors which comprise the French flag, and the trilogy can be thought of as a critique of Europe in the 1990s. Some argue that "Red" is an anti-romance film.

Before reading William James' chapter within "Psychology: The Briefer Course" (1892) on attention, I watched "Red" and observed subtle techniques utilized by Kieslowski to capture my attention. Following reading James, I believe many techniques Kieslowski uses can be seen similarly described by James' concept of attention, as Kieslowski blends involuntary, dispersed, and directed attention within film to tell the story. James' concept of attention can lend itself to film quite easily,

This cycling of attention is much easier said than accomplished. One of my friends' recent film school assignments is to create a 3-5 short minute film -- the rules are simple: do not use violence with weapons to tell your story. Many times, we rely on immediate "involuntary fascination," such as a knife or gun as an effective, but cheap way to thrill us and capture our attention. The result of Kieslowski's use of attention contributes to a deeper understanding of the film's overall conceit, by integrating the color red as a metaphor to describe the human experience.

The color red is present in every scene, as a reminder in the "dim background," as James says, perhaps of the ever-present notion of love in our lives. Yet, the viewer is complicit in this understanding, because Kieslowski has prepared us by calling the film "Red" -- building our familiarity, so that it is involuntary, and thus can be better understood to make our own interpretation (prediction).

(Image: http://www.dw.com/image/0,,19346939_303,00.jpg)

 A viewer may watch "Red" or any film several times and begin to notice new information with each new experience. One might argue that we gain familiarity with 'new' elements when we are exposed to the same information again. This is certainly true. Yet, Kieslowski is aware of this, and utilizes the visual techniques through repetition by depicting the same sound or color (red) and associating it with a certain character or memory.

Unlucky in love. For example, the color red appears when Valentine (Irene Jacob) visits the local convenience store to play coin slots -- and is rewarded with three of a kind (red cherries). Unfortunately, her lover is far away from her and the sight of winning stings badly. (Image: http://www.rowthree.com/2011/06/22/exploring-kieslowskis-three-colors-trilogy-red-1994/) 

Such snippets of visual information, like the moment of directed attention on the slot machine, reinforce a motif. The motif is reinforced by the concept of attention, as James writes "how many objects can we attend to at once[?]" in the context of understanding language. In relation to Kieslowski, as viewers, we are exposed to many stimuli both involuntarily and voluntarily. As in "Red," James observes that "when data are so disconnected...we have no conception which embraces them together it is much harder to apprehend several of them at once." 

Although in his film, Kieslowski utilizes many disparate visual data, playing on the difficulty of interpreting various types of attention, it forces the viewer to find a common link between the images: red. How does the color red operate within the film to tell a cohesive story? This is the subject of Kieslowski's interest -- it is there when Valentine wakes up, it is there when she smiles, it is there when she cries.

Using the camera to direct attention, Kieslowski chooses elements or colors to add additional information to capture our attention, such as when Valentine looks through her window to see Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) at the moment when he is leaving his red Jeep parked on the side of the street. Similarly, Valentine's consecutive visits to the Judge's home (Jean-Louis Trintignant) are repeatedly accompanied by the sound of a plane overhead.

William James: "The stimulus is either a sense-impression, very intense, voluminous, or sudden; or it is an instinctive stimulus, a perception which, by reason of its nature rather than its mere force, appeals to some one of our congenital impulses and has a directly exciting quality" (88). (Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James)

 As James describes, the involuntary attention that is at work is often linked to sudden or instinctive stimuli.Throughout "Red," the viewer becomes accustomed to switching between a variety of intense, sudden, and instinctive stimilu -- colors, sounds, and repetitive actions -- Kieslowski is a master of selecting specific sensory elements. We are forced to choose which of these elements to focus on, and which we will deem most important to us. The effect leads to emotional investment in the characters, but also a better understanding of ourselves by pointing to which of these moments we ascribe importance to and asking why. "Red" makes the mundane seem very interesting -- just like love itself.