A Temporal Hierarchy of Sustained Attention Dynamics

Abstract

Maintaining focus is a critical component of attention. Our ability to do so, however, changes over time—developing across the life span, declining as tasks drag on, fluctuating from one second to the next, and even oscillating at the subsecond level. Research in psychology and neuroscience has made great strides in understanding how and why attention varies—and how this variation affects other mental processes—at each timescale. To motivate the integration of findings across scales and facilitate theoretical advances and practical interventions to enhance focus, I propose a nested hierarchy in which changes are considered in the context of dynamics at all other scales.