It is often not easy to follow Albert Einstein’s maxim: “Never consider study as a duty, but as an opportunity to penetrate the magnificent and wonderful world of knowledge. “Young people who go through the compulsory education system generally don’t think so, but it’s a perfect phrase to introduce the concept of sustained care.
Although learning can be a pleasure and not just an obligation, maintaining sustained care is not always easy, in fact, on many occasions it can be a really difficult, almost impossible job, and that doesn’t just happen in case we’re not interested in a topic; there can be many other reasons, such as fatigue, for example.
- Sustained care comes into play in many of the activities we carry out on a day-to-day life.
- It is characteristic.
- In particular.
- Of the processes related to supervision or control.
- So for the monitoring to be effective and the attention maintained it is necessary to maintain a certain level of activation.
Sustained care also comes into play in many learning-related processes. Students who attend their classes every day should work hard to keep their attention on what the teacher says.
Sometimes sustained attention ends up mixing with selective attention, that is, not only do we have to keep our attention, but we also have to keep it focused on a specific place while we try to resist the attraction of other factors.
Therefore, sustained attention comes into play when we put in place mechanisms and processes in our body that require maintaining a concentration of attention to remain alert to certain stimuli for relatively long periods of time.
“Were you not created to live like a beast, but to follow the path of virtue and wisdom?-Dante Alighieri-
Studies and experience tell us that the level of sustained care decreases over time, this decrease in efficiency with which we are able to maintain attention may be due to different reasons, the most important would be:
There are also variables that can help us maintain our attention, such as motivation, pauses, positive feedback or fluency would be some.
It is obvious that these factors are known, several theories have already been developed to try to explain how our sustained attention works.
Also known as arousal theory or arousal theory, he proposes that for a monitoring task to be performed correctly there must be some continuity of stimuli, for example, if we refer to a security guard, it will be easier for him to keep his attention if he moves and makes rounds than if he is standing all the time in a seated position.
Also known as TDS, this theory holds that in the face of a care task, the number of alerts decreases. In other words, if we are with sustained tired attention, the stimulus must be greater to be detected. Thus, we note that as time goes on and that we keep our attention, successes decrease, but also false positives.
Expectations theory says that the person watching, and therefore the person who catches your attention, will hold you back longer if you expect something to happen; for example, the guardian will keep your attention longer and more dedicated if you actually wait for someone. to come and rob the factory.
On the contrary, if expectations are low, the attention will be more difficult to maintain, so for the student who does not have the hope that the teacher will say something interesting, the task of maintaining attention will be much more difficult.
This last theory says that addiction makes the person lose interest in what is happening, so their attention drops a lot, that is, attention decreases due to the regular repetition of irrelevant signals.
Not all are theories that claim to explain how sustained attention works in follow-up or learning tasks, however, they are the most relevant and relate directly to what we know how care works.
What do you get with hard work is the dearest thing?-Aristotle-