45 Making Connections (IntroPSYC and Health): Divided Attention and Driving
By Meghan E. Norris and Riley J.T. Bonar
Welcome to our unit on Attention and Memory. We know you have been working hard to pay attention to many things (this course, other courses, your job, your friends, your family, hilarious reels, and more). In this unit, you will explore the science of attention and memory.
As we head into this area of cognitive psychology in our course, we want to highlight that the science of attention and memory has very broad applications. It is perhaps obvious that we want to understand how people learn and remember content in educational and health contexts so that we can facilitate better decision making. In business contexts, advertisers want to know what captures attention and leads to brand recognition (and later purchasing!).
In this instance of Making Connections, we want to highlight how the science of attention has life threatening consequences when it comes to distracted driving. We hope that this video by Dr. Paul Atchley, now a Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida, will make you think twice about using your phone while driving.
This video focuses on consequences of divided attention in driving, but divided attention can have negative consequences in many contexts. You will get to learn more about divided attention, and attention and memory more broadly, in our unit this week.
If this field of psychology caught your attention, Dr. Effie Pereria and Dr. Jeffrey Wammes at Queen’s University both have exciting, novel research on the topics of attention and memory! Dr. Pereria focuses on understanding the dynamics of attention, which captures how this vital process ebbs and flows and fluctuates over time. Prioritizing attentional dynamics in this manner allows us to (i) account for the rich flexibility we see in attention across our everyday lives, (ii) grasp why patterns of attention can result in behaviour that is both adaptive and maladaptive, and (iii) highlight the unique individual factors that make your attention different from others.
Dr. Wammes focuses on understanding how learning and experience can fundamentally reshape the way we represent information in memory, as well as how our representational spaces are actively reorganized to facilitate retrieval from memory.
References
Atchley, P. (2017, September). Distraction is literally killing us. TEDxYouth@KC [Video]. TEDxYouth@KC. https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_atchley_distraction_is_literally_killing_us_paul_atchley_tedxyouth_kc
