Our (Un)divided Attention

Digital distractions have altered the learning landscape, but researchers at SBU say don’t blame the technology. Taking control is in our hands.

By Tom Missel

Overwhelmed by information? Join the club. Seneca is a member, posthumously. He’s been dead since 65. Not 1965 — 65 A.D. “The abundance of books is distraction,” wrote the Roman philosopher.

English scholar Robert Burton expressed similar frustration in “The Anatomy of Melancholy” — 498 years ago.

“What a glut of books! Who can read them (all)? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning,” Burton wrote.

Humans have always had difficulty adapting to revolutionary new modes of communication, at first embracing their novelty yet eventually cursing their existence. Social scientists and psychologists have bemoaned the mind-numbing influence of television since comedian Milton Berle was pulling in 80 percent of the audience on NBC in the early 1950s, causing some businesses to close for the hour his show aired.

The scientific voices reacting to the detrimental impact of the digital tsunami of the 21st century are just as loud, but they’re also realistic. Google will continue to process 3.5 billion searches every day and Apple isn’t stopping at the iPhone X.

“It’s now our way of life. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said Dr. Kimberly Young, director of St. Bonaventure’s Strategic Leadership graduate program and one of the world’s leading experts on internet addiction. “No doubt, it’s changed us as a society. How could it not? Our phones are like appliances.”

Young first recognized that the internet might be addictive in 1995, when the piercing screech of $1.99-per-hour dial-up service to access America Online opened up a world few understood.

“I had a friend whose husband was spending 50 to 60 hours a week online, so there were financial problems and he was meeting women in AOL chatrooms and they ended up getting a divorce,” said Young, a licensed psychologist who soon after founded the Center for Internet Addiction. “The case made me wonder if people could get addicted to the internet the way they get addicted to drugs or alcohol or sex.”

Young posted a small survey online in “one of those old-fashioned news groups and, Boom! I was getting phone calls and emails from people saying, ‘This is me, or this is my son or this is my husband.’ I knew immediately I had tapped into something.”

The next year, at the 104th American Psychological Association Convention in Toronto, Young presented a paper titled “Internet addiction: the emergence of a new clinical disorder.”

“The PR department came down to hear my paper,” said Young, who has published more than 50 journal articles and four books on internet addiction. “And there was all this commotion from the media — the AP, the Canadian Broadcasting Company. ‘What? The internet is addictive?’ It was a sensation.”

More than 20 years later, Young’s voice is one of the first that researchers and media seek out. Her work has been cited by hundreds of media outlets, from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal to CNN and “Good Morning America.”

Young was among the first researchers to probe the dark side of the internet. At the time, concerns were focused on adults immersing themselves in the anonymity of online chat rooms. But the advent of more sophisticated video gaming, Wi-Fi and mobile technology not only accelerated the problem, it shifted the focus to the impact on children.

“The accessibility and the immediacy have been the biggest changes, along with this generational shift,” Young said. “You never used to see a 2- or 3-year-old playing on their mom’s iPad or smartphone in a restaurant. That’s the concern.”

Those concerns have spread to the classroom.

CALM heads emerge at Bona’s

Last fall, Dr. Althea Need Kaminske and Dr. Adam Brown founded the Center for Attention, Learning and Memory (CALM) at

St. Bonaventure, in part to study the impact that digital technology has had on student performance in the classroom.

The center’s goal is to offer workshops and training to support faculty development and to promote student/faculty research in the areas of attention and learning across departments and schools.

“This is an opportunity to work collaboratively with faculty to improve our teaching and our scholarship of teaching,” Kaminske said.

The chance to cross the academic aisle to work with a colleague in another school who shared similar interests was appealing.

“In the real world, cognitive psychologists, like Althea, and educational psychologists, like me, never get together, and it’s bull——,” said Brown, an associate professor in the School of Education since 2000. “Working together, we get so much more done.”

Kaminske, an assistant professor of psychology since 2013, explained the distinction.

“Educational psychology is more rooted within the classroom practices, dealing with the more messy day-to-day activity, like, How do we teach in the classroom and deal with the realities of having 30 different people in a room?”

“Cognitive psychology is more based on research and controlled settings; the two can complement each other nicely. We have similar research interests, but different backgrounds so it’s nice to be able to talk to somebody who understands the research you do. That’s incredibly valuable.”

The professors co-authored a book earlier this year debunking teaching and learning myths and presented their research about cell phones and the impact they have on student learning at the 59th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Nov. 15-18, in New Orleans.

“Cell phones in the classroom, or when they’re studying, are killing kids,” Brown said. “They realize that maybe they’re not a good thing, they just don’t realize how bad they are. You waste a couple minutes here, a couple minutes there, big deal. But if you take a look and really calculate it, you just wasted an hour or more of your day. But since they’re little tiny chunks at a time, it doesn’t seem like it’s a giant waste but it is.”

Adults aren’t much better.

“Some companies are starting to ban laptops and cellphones in meetings because people will sit there texting and emailing, thinking they can multi-task but they are missing stuff, important stuff,” Brown said.

The notion that we can multi-task — do two things proficiently at once — is mythology.

“If you’re doing a couple of really easy things, sure, you can switch back and forth and that cost for not doing either as well as you could is pretty low,” Kaminske said. “But that’s very different than listening to a really difficult lecture and then, suddenly, your phone vibrates: ‘Did my friend just text me about that party?’

“That’s all it takes is one split second to lose your place and that cost goes higher the more complicated or difficult a task is. It can cause breakdowns in cognitive processing at critical times in the learning and memory process.”

The urge to resist the siren song of the text alert or the Instagram emoji isn’t easy for students, some who’ve had a smartphone in their hands since elementary school.

“It hasn’t rewired our brains, but it does exploit certain tendencies that we already have in terms of our reward mechanisms,” Kaminske said. “We like when people like us and we like when people like our thing. So every time someone likes your picture or whatever, that’s feeding into the reward structure that we already have because we like to engage with people. …

“And because you’re training yourself to look at this thing all the time — like Pavlov’s dog, over and over again — that notification is the same thing as a bell. That social gratification is just like that food to a dog,” she said.

The majority of people “don’t practice the skill of ignoring it,” Brown said.

“That whole inhibition piece is incredibly important … (but) for most people these days, there’s no filter anymore,” he said. “You hear that ding or feel that buzz and you don’t care if you have the most important thing going on right here, you’re going to try to check to see what’s going on.”

Heather Harris, an assistant professor in the Jandoli School of Communication, said the fragmented attention span that a smartphone creates isn’t the only issue in the classroom.

“They don’t seem to ever open their field of vision when looking at a problem. They approach everything as a Google search and then choose the first or second thing that pops up,” she said. “The moment they see something, that’s it and they never look any further.”

The relative ease of discovery that search engines have created results in frustration when the answers aren’t so easily found.

“I am always surprised how easily they will give up on anything when they run into a hiccup,” Harris said.

The erosion of persistence in students’ problem-solving skills is troublesome, Brown said.

“I’ll tell a student, ‘If you just spent another three minutes trying to figure that out, you’d have figured it out,’” Brown said. “But think about it logically, from a kid’s point of view: Someone else has already figured out this problem. Why am I wasting my time? I can just go look it up in two seconds.

“But the underlying piece they don’t understand is that the time you spend problem solving, figuring something out, has lasting effects. It’s not just the answer that’s the important part. It’s the work to get there.”

But don’t blame the medium …

Renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who prophesied more than 50 years ago the web technology we have today, once said: “To raise a moral complaint (about technology) is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off your fingers.”

Kaminske agrees.

“I’m giving a workshop in January as part of The Learning Scientists, which is an opportunity I never would have had if it wasn’t for social media and the internet. We’ve been collaborating together for a few years now from different parts of the globe,” she said. “It’s been incredibly beneficial. I don’t like any stance that’s anti-technology. It’s a tool and I think it only becomes a problem when it’s using us and we’re not using it.

“As long as you understand how this affects your ability to learn, to pay attention, and you set boundaries and control yourself, it’s fine.”

The challenge is to focus, but the research is encouraging.

“There are a lot of promising studies to show that it’s not all downhill from here. We can gain control,” Kaminske said. “We can train our ability to focus. We’re going to do more research next semester looking more at selective attention and focus or, as a lot of people like to call it these days, mindfulness and meditation.”

Put simply, selective attention is a commitment to “single-tasking,” Kaminske said.

“Ignoring the distracting stuff and keeping your target on one piece of work,” Brown said. “Just deciding, for example, ‘I will ignore my phone for the next half hour’ … and actually doing it.”

Young suggests something slightly more drastic to those whose lives and relationships have been damaged by their inability to untangle themselves from the web.

“Take a 48-hour digital detox,” Young said. “Put the phone in the charger and don’t touch it for two days and see how you feel. See what else you’d do. Maybe you’d actually sit and talk to your family. No technology, no DVDs, nothing. At the very least, make an effort to carve out some tech-free family time.”

Tom Missel is the chief communications officer at St. Bonaventure.