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Concentration Against Distraction: Article Analysis

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The article, How Concentration Shields Against Distraction, talks about having external distractions to where we become so focused on the task at hand that we do not realize or focus on our surroundings. What the authors are trying to portray is the idea of concentration and the fact that it will, in a sense, block out any distractions. With concentration, come different levels. For slower levels of concentration, one would be able to catch what is going on in the background. But once the levels increase, one’s focus becomes more prominent on the task to where one does not know what is happening in the background. Authors, Patrik Sörqvist and John E. Marsh, use an example of playing a game of Tetris and listening to the radio. While playing …show more content…

Exogenous factor is when you maintain a certain level of performance that you need to compensate for the increase in the task. Where as the endogenous factors are the opposite in being that you can engage with higher concentration in the task that you are completing. Sörqvist and Marsh stated that people could differ in concentration levels when compared to each other. “Individual differences in working memory capacity are typically measured with complex span tasks and are assumed to reflect differences in people’s ability to stay focused on what is relevant and resist distraction.” (Engle, 2002, as cited in Sörqvist & Marsh, 2015). What I think they are meaning by this is that people have a difference in what they tend to focus on, which then reflects their memory. The individual difference in working memory capacity (WMC) is an endogenous factor due to using higher concentration for the task at hand. Thus, as stated in the text, these individuals are less likely to become distracted by unwanted distractions. “WMC is related to both shield mechanisms: High-WMC individuals show a more substantial attenuation of background environment processing when task difficulty is high and they show a greater resistance to attention capture.” (Sörqvist, Stenfelt, & Rönnberg, 2012, as cited in Sörqvist & Marsh,

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