Attention is a cognitive function that is used in almost all daily life activities. When we pay attention to objects and people around us, to sounds, images and every stimulus that may be in the environment for instance.

It is therefore important to stimulate attention to keep the brain active.

What is attention?

Attention is the cognitive function that allows us to differentiate between important and distracting stimuli. Indeed, in the environment there are several stimuli and our brain must succeed in filtering them to know where to focus our attention (attentional focus). Depending on our objective, a stimulus can be important or not. For example, if I am looking for a friend in a crowd and I know that he is dressed in red, my attention will be focused on the people with a red shirt and my brain will not process the stimuli of people dressed in other colors.

Attentional skills also allow us to stay focused on an activity and use all of our skills to achieve the result. If we are distracted, we take longer to organize or finish an activity and once we have finished, we don’t necessarily remember what we did.

Attention disorders

Attention can be more fragile in certain situations. The main disorder related to attention is ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). ADHD is often associated with children because it is a difficulty that emerges in childhood, but there are also many adults who suffer from ADHD.

There are also other pathologies that can create attention problems, such as Alzheimer’s, Stroke or head trauma.

In all these situations, the difficulties can be varied: in general, the person may have difficulty filtering out certain stimuli. On the one hand, the person perceives all stimuli as important and therefore his or her focus quickly shifts from one object to another (ADHD), on the other hand, the brain is unable to maintain attention on a stimulus and is therefore easily distracted.

Exercises to train and improve your semantic memory

Training your attention is very important and you can do it quietly at home. Of course, if you have a pathology or a specific disorder, you should ask your doctor or a health professional for advice.

To train attention, one of the most effective exercises is the double task, i.e. doing two activities at the same time. The activities should be of a different nature, for example singing a song while you cook a meal or drawing the infinity symbol (by continuing to draw it several times on the same shape) while you watch a movie.

This activity has a double effect: your brain stays active because it has to do two things, so it is more difficult for your attention to be drawn to a third stimulus. Also, in both activities, one task is “less important” than the other so your brain learns to focus on the more important activity. For example, if you are cooking and singing, your brain focuses on the preparation of the meal and you will sing the song without thinking about the words.

In general, to train attention, try to increase the amount of time you spend on an activity. For example, if you read the newspaper for 10 minutes a day, try increasing to 13 minutes and then to 15. You need to increase gradually and pace yourself.

Our games to work on attention

• A Text A Day
• Crazy Chessboard
• Crazy Waterfall
• ColorMind
• Brain Storm
• Moles Invasion
• Flying Balloons
• Pop Balloons
• Shapebox

1. Recognition of important stimuli

The environment is full of stimuli. A stimulus is not important in itself, but its importance changes depending on the situation or your goal.

For example, if you are crossing the road and you hear a horn it is an important stimulus because it could be a dangerous situation, whereas if you are at home and you hear an alarm outside, you don’t necessarily have to pay attention to it.

This work of filtering stimuli is an automatic work done by our brain thanks to attention. If you have an attention disorder, this skill can become more fragile and, in certain situations, it could be dangerous. This is why it is very important to improve this function.

With this game you can improve your attention span, stimuli recognition and information filtering.

You can also play with two players, each on his own side of the screen. In this game mode, you also work on your response time to be the first to press the button.

2. Recognition of distracting stimuli

As there are important stimuli, there are also distracting stimuli. These are strong or interesting stimuli that are not important for our task. Our attentional capacity must be able to filter out these stimuli and erase them.

For example, if you are cleaning and you hear on TV that your favorite program is starting, you can give up cleaning, focus on the TV and forget what you were doing. Of course, you can change what you are doing, but you must first finish the activity or at least tidy up a bit.

In this case too, a stimulus is not necessarily distracting or not, it depends on the situation. It is thanks to our attentional capacity that we can identify when a stimulus is distracting.

3. Attentional focus

Once we have selected the important and distracting stimuli, we need to keep our attentional focus on the activity to complete it. This ability allows us to stay focused and not get distracted.

This skill is very important when watching a movie, reading a book or talking to someone to follow the speech.

When there is a difficulty, normally it is this function that is the first to become more fragile. Daily training can help to improve cognitive functions and therefore delay the onset of symptoms.

In this game there are several actions to carry out and to do so we use our attention in different ways. So we have to stay focused during the whole game.

4. Selected, divided and sustained attention

There are different forms of attention: selective attention, divided attention and sustained attention.

Selective attention is the ability to respond selectively to a single source of information (visual or auditory) among others without being distracted by other stimuli. It is a kind of attentional zoom that allows us to focus our attention on a particular target.

In our daily lives, we are almost constantly required to do several things at once. In order to do this, we need to optimally distribute our attentional resources in order to be able to do these different things correctly (and not privilege one at the expense of the others). Sharing attentional resources constitutes divided attention.

Sustained attention is the ability to maintain attention over a long period of time. It is particularly solicited at school, when it is necessary to remain focused for several hours at a time. This type of attention allows us to accomplish long and complicated tasks.

Discover the COCO THINKS and COCO MOVES app

Focus on COCO THINKS et COCO MOVES

The COCO THINKS and COCO MOVES app counts more than 30 educational and sports games for children from 5 to 10 years old. The games stimulate all cognitive functions: attention, memory, language, logic and much more. The child learns and improves while having fun!

You don’t need wifi to use CCCO app, so the child can play wherever he wants.

The sports break

After 15 minutes of screen use, the application stops to propose physical activities. This break allows the child to air his brain, to process the information received and to be more motivated for the following activities.

For children, taking regular breaks is important because, without it, they will be overloaded and will be less motivated, more frustrated and more tired.

Moreover, with sports activities you can stimulate attention in a less rigid and more fun way.