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More than Just Paying Attention
Attention skills are important to “paying attention” in school and beyond. However, attention skills are more important than just paying attention, they are foundational to executive function skills, which include self-control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.
The importance of attention and executive function skills cannot be overstated. One research study found that a child’s attention skills at age 4 correlate strongly with whether they graduated from college by age 25. The good news is that attention skills can be trained. When children improve attention skills, they do better in school and in life.
Practice, Practice, Practice
So how can children with weak attention skills train them? The best way is to practice. However, it is difficult to practice attention skills directly. So, we need to find ways to train those skills in an indirect way.
Activities that require focus and attention placed on the precise movement of the body, such as ballet and martial arts, can really benefit attention. Children practice precise movements, again and again, to really get a feel for it. Plus, it is important to pay attention to where your body is in space. And, these environments are designed for focus. When my boys did karate, I was amazed at how a karate dojo can keep young kids focused on their movements and the direction of their sensei. Ballet is similar in that it is an environment that is cultivated to be very serious about moving.
BrainLeap’s attention training games use the eye movement system to indirectly train attention skills. You control the games using only your eyes — no mouse or keyboard is used. Because the attention system and the eye movement system share brain circuitry, attention can be trained based on where we look and where we are planning to look (a split second before making the eye movement).
It is not so different from lifting weights to increase strength for a specific sport. If you want to kick a ball farther in soccer, you can strengthen your legs, apply that strength to kick the ball, then continue to strengthen your legs, and so on.
What improvements can I expect?
Each child has different attention challenges, so results can vary. One parent shared that his son had trouble reading anything longer than encyclopedia entries because he could not stay focused to read a full page of text. After attention training for two months, he was able to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Other parents have shared that their children have a much easier time staying focused on math problems. That allows them to work through more difficult problems and to get them done in a shorter period of time.
We are confident that nearly any child who has attention challenges can benefit from training. That is why we offer guaranteed results. Better attention skills help children focus in class and improve executive functioning, which helps in school and more broadly in life.
© BrainLeap Technologies 2021
