It’s four o’clock and its finally time to clock out. I walk out to my car, turn it on, back out and quickly make my way home. This is my schedule every single day during the summer. At the beginning of every summer I notice that it takes a few days, sometimes even a week or so to get back into my usual routine. But it isn’t long until my routine starts to become automatic. It’s so automatic that I often find myself attending to other thoughts in my brain on my way home as opposed to focusing on the road and almost everyday I find that when I pull into my driveway, I can’t remember passing by certain landmarks, changing lanes, or even turning into my neighborhood.
This peculiar phenomenon reminded me of the subject of attention, which was covered in Cognitive Psychology in chapter four. This chapter mentioned the human ability to multitask, which can be done through divided attention. The book mentions that practice allows us to be able to effectively divide our attention between two or more things. For me on my daily drive home, those two things happen to be driving and thinking deeply about things that don’t pertain to my driving. Just as was mentioned in the book, the immense amount of times that I have “practiced” my drive home and the simplicity of it has resulted in it becoming somewhat of an automatic process, which then allows me to think about other things while I’m driving and later causes me to question how I arrived home in the first place (Goldstein, 2011).
However, there are other processes that don’t seem to come as easily to me, such as reading and retaining all of the information that I read. I often experience moments when reading for a class, for example, in which I am reading and suddenly my attention grazes off to something else and I can’t remember what I just read. In this instance my mind automatically follows the words because reading has become an automatic process, however comprehending the words is another story. In terms of comprehending what I have read, my mind would have to partake in controlled processing, which according to the book is something that one must pay attention to at all times (Goldstein, 2011).
In conclusion, we are constantly faced with things that require our attention. Some skills through practice become automatic, but the more difficult skills must be controlled.
Goldstein, E. Bruce. “Perception.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Third ed. Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. 51-57. Print.
Attention is defined as the focusing on specific features of the environment or on certain thoughts or activities according to our text, (Goldstein, 2011). As I was reading your post I could identify with many of the things you were talking about. I live about 40 miles from my job and depending on the traffic it can take up to an hour. I am so used to driving certain routes that the process has become automatic. There have been several times where I have driven for 20 miles and looked and wondered how did I get to that stretch of highway. I’ll ask myself, how did I get to this exit so fast. This usually happens when I get into deep thought like you said. I’ll be thinking so deeply about some stuff on the way home that time passes without me even knowing and I also cover a lot of distance without even knowing. Sometimes I’ll even get nervous or scare myself wondering how I drove that far without remember changing lanes or how I got there. You also brought up a good point about retaining information or memory while reading. What I have learned is that learning the bold words and definitions helps, the lesson plans have so much information that it is impossible to retain it all. Multitasking is something I pride myself on being able to do, but what I have noticed is that when people do not give certain things their undivided attention that the product may not be as great as it could have been if undivided attention was given to that thing, person, or item.