Page 56 - The CoESPU Magazine N 1 - 2018

Variations such as these are influenced by factors that are in part known and controllable (fatigue , us of
pharmacological agents, etc) and in part unpredictable or inseparable from the disease (e.g. impaired
attention following head injury).
Data yielded from tests of attention reflect the inextricable interaction between the two automatic and
voluntary components. In some cases, automatic processes predominate over voluntary ones. Patients
with frontal damage show more automatic responses, which may account for their marked
distractibility. In point of fact, these patients have great difficulty in completing a task because they are
constantly distracted by such irrelevant stimuli as background noises or voices. But not only
neurological patients show these, but also normal people that are involved in situations for which they
are not trained or are trained not enough or not a specific way.

Attentional Processes and Nature of the task

During performance of a task, attention is affected by the characteristics of the activity being carried
out (type, duration, intensity) and to the characteristics of the person (psychological traits, level of
anxiety and training).
By controlling and varying these variables, it is possible to quantify the attentional cost of a specific
task and so evaluate the attentional capacity of a subject at any given time. Normally we can
distinguish the attentional processes involved in different kinds of task, so better contextualize the topic
with practical activities:
• focused attention: the ability to respond to a discrete stimuli. We remember that tunnel vision is
an automatic process, often involuntary, strictly linked this type of attention;

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