How to Take Action on Distraction - A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Focus and Attention in the Early Years

Dr Gemma Goldenberg and Prof Sam Wass. ISEY - Institute for the Science of Early Years

This month on The PLAYlist, we’ve got a really useful article from Dr Gemma Goldenberg and Prof Sam Wass , looking at what attention actually means in the Early Years. There’s a lot of talk about children being more distracted than ever, but this article helps unpick whether that’s really true, or whether we need to look again at our expectations and environments. It draws on current neuroscience, but in a way that’s clear and practical, with helpful strategies you can try straight away. A great one to read and reflect on as a team.

Do we have an attention crisis?

Early years practitioners seem increasingly concerned about children's inability to focus and engage deeply in activities. We’re hearing that children jump from one task to another, forget instructions almost immediately, and struggle to sit still during adult-led sessions.

Many people blame technology, suggesting that children are used to fast-paced media, making everything else seem boring in comparison. But have modern children really lost the skill of paying attention, or do the environments and structures in place in the Early Years, need rethinking in line with newer understandings of children’s brain development?

Rethinking attention

There is a lot that recent neuroscience has taught us about how young children’s brains work. We know that in many cases, children are actually paying too much attention not too little, and we also now know that a young child’s attention is very different to an adult’s or even an older child’s. Understanding this can help us view attention differently.

Attention ‘capture’ and attention ‘control’

One of the most important distinctions we describe in our book about attention in the early years is the difference between 2 contrasting types of attention; attention capture and attention control.

Some things capture our attention without us having to try to focus on them at all. Think about how hard it is to ignore a pop up advert online, or how children react when there is a fly buzzing around the room. Things which move and make noises grab our attention effortlessly. The same is true of flashing lights and bright colours.

This is because as early humans, when something in our field of vision moved, it was probably a predator that wanted to eat us, or something that we wanted to hunt and eat for ourselves! So for survival reasons our brains are wired to notice movement and noise, and to pay close attention to them. The brain networks involved in this type of attention capture develop very early, so even babies will naturally pay attention to lights, colour, movement and noise. These days, advertisers and social media companies are great at exploiting this natural instinct for their advantage, we are constantly fed a never ending loop of moving images with sound which are designed to grab our attention, and hold it for as long as possible.

In contrast, attention control is our ability to resist such distractions and choose what to concentrate on, controlling the focus of our attention like a spotlight. This is often the type of attention we want to see from children in the Early Years, the ability to listen to us when we’re teaching, and ignore other distractions. The problem is, the brain networks that are responsible for attention control are some of the slowest to develop, they’re still developing even in a 20 year old! Children in the Early Years have not formed these networks fully, so attention control is very hard for them, in some cases even impossible.

Where does attention flourish?

A key message from the book is that attention difficulties aren’t solely due to brain differences; a child’s ability to focus also depends on their physical environment. Several chapters of the book explore how noise, visual clutter, and outdoor settings impact attention. We also discuss how adjusting aspects of the environment can help regulate children’s arousal levels, which in turn affects their attention control.

We know that young children find it much harder to filter out distractions than older children do, they also struggle more to tune into an adult’s voice when there is background noise. The ability to separate out the sound of one voice from other chatter doesn’t finish developing until children are around 12 years old. Sometimes when we think a child isn’t paying attention to us, they actually just can’t hear what we are saying! Just because an adult can hear easily in a nursery environment, doesn’t mean a child can.

In the book we share lots of practical tips about how you can tackle the challenge of working with children who don’t yet have attention control, by adapting the environment. Here are a few examples:

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Adapting the learning environment to support attention: Practical tips

● Reduce excess noise by introducing more soft furnishings and fabrics, this will reduce reverberation (noises bouncing off hard surfaces and becoming intermingled) and will make it easier for children to tune into your voice

● Avoid having excess visual clutter (e.g. lots of wall displays and posters), especially in teaching zones as these create more information that children have to process. Research has shown that wall displays can be a source of distraction and prevent children from paying attention to the adult that’s present. Complex patterns, multiple colours and lots of edges are particularly taxing for children to process.

● Use attention capture to your advantage by incorporating sound, movement and colour into your activities. This will help children to focus on you and what you’re doing, rather than other distractions. Use visual resources, gestures and intonation in your voice to capture children’s attention more easily.

In conclusion, the idea of an attention crisis is more nuanced than it seems. While technology and environmental factors play a role in how children focus, the developmental differences in how young children manage attention are also crucial. Understanding the distinction between attention capture and attention control helps us see that attention struggles are a natural part of growth. Creating supportive environments and using developmentally appropriate strategies can help nurture children’s attention skills. Rather than viewing these challenges as deficits, we can see them as an opportunity to better understand how children experience the world around them.

Prof Sam Wass and Dr Gemma Goldenberg are researchers working at ISEY - Institute for the Science of Early Years and Youth. Read more about their research and training at www.isey.org.

“Take Action on Distraction” is the first book in the Bloomsbury ‘Putting Neuroscience into Practice” series. It translates the latest research on attention into accessible, practical tips for teachers.