EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS

Sustained Attention

Sustained attention involves the ability to maintain one's focus and attention in the presence of distractions and other activities.  It involves the ability to return to an activity when interrupted and persist in attending to a tedious or boring task.  It may also involve the process of attending to multiple sources of information and being able to selectively choose what is most important to attend to. 

Sustained attention is developmental, as older children may need lengthier periods of time to focus on completing a task.  It may require a child to remain seated at school or throughout an entire lunch or dinner.  Displays of sustained attention are increased for all children when a task is particularly interesting and varied. 

Skillful application of sustained attention is seen in children who:

• Sit and complete their homework in a timely fashion.
• Display the ability to maintain their focus in conversations and discussions with others.
• Continue to work on tasks that may be boring or dull, such as a chore.
• Are able to sit still through a short ceremony such as a wedding, graduation or confirmation.
• Tend to complete one play activity, such as coloring a picture, before starting another, such as playing with other toys.

Unskilled use of sustained attention is seen in children who:

• Get up and down frequently when doing their homework.
• Are easily distracted by noise and activities surrounding them.
• Frequently report being bored.
• Have difficulty sitting though an entire meal.
• Report having numerous unfinished projects for school and at home.
• Experience difficulty watching a complete television show or movie.
• Need to bring home incomplete class work to do as homework.
• Cannot sit or listen to a story or reading for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time.

Sustained Attention Games

Game and technology play involves the need for sustained attention in order to not miss out on important clues and feedback. In order to be successful at games involving complexity, children must attend to details and use this information at later points in the game. In order fully to appreciate a movie or television show, children must sustain their attention throughout in order to understand the connections among events. This may include following several storylines at once while shifting attention from one to the next as the plot progresses. Many active video games such as Guitar Hero and Dance, Dance, Revolution require sustained focus simply to complete movements during a song. 

Game play helps children develop better sustained attention when they practice skills such as:

• Learning to ignore or avoid attending to extraneous activities in the game that are no longer useful.
• Returning to an activity within the game when it was interrupted.
• Attending to multiple sources of information at the same time in order to be successful.
• Shifting one’s attention back and forth between items within the game in order to move to another level.
• Identifying areas in the game where it is particularly difficult to tune out distractions.

Parent Tips:

Select games in which regular repetition of tasks is required for successful game play. 

Use opportunities when children must stop game play to do something else, such as going to school or eating dinner, as a chance to discuss their ability to return to an activity when something is interrupted.

Watch a complex (but age-appropriate) television, show such as “The West Wing,” “24,” or “House,” that requires attention to various plots, details, and cues. Point out how one must sustain attention yet switch focus as a viewer.

• Bejeweled 2
• Insaniquarium
• Rayman: Raving Rabbids
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Trauma Center: Second Opinion
• Wubbzy’s Amazing Adventure
• Luffarshack
• Guitar Hero