The attention seekers
February 2009
Zara Skidmore was worried about the low attention span of her 7 year-old daughter. Sasha often couldn’t remember what she’d done at the end of the school day, and getting her to concentrate long enough to do her homework was a struggle. So Zara turned to the internet, where she found an American company called Play Attention, offering computer software that promised to improve children’s ability to pay attention.
As a psychology graduate, Zara was immediately interested in what Play Attention had to offer, but it was at least a year before she and her partner Ian Glasscock, a former teacher with an MSc in cognitive neuroscience, decided to go ahead and buy the product. It proved so successful in improving their daughter’s attention that four months ago, they decided to offer it in Britain, on a not-for-profit basis.
It’s not hard to see why Zara’s interest was piqued. Based on flight-simulation technology developed by NASA, Play Attention consists of a set of problem-solving games on a personal computer. The child plays the games while wearing a helmet, which uses an electro-encephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity and deduce whether the child is focusing on the game or is distracted.
The activity in the brain has a direct impact on the game. “On screen they get to see their attention controlling a character, or a script within the game,” says Zara. “So what they can see is their attention in real time. If they do any distracting behaviour, the character will move in a way they don’t want him to move.” One game, for example, is set in a spaceship, with asteroids flying towards the child. “If they get distracted and aren’t concentrating on the asteroids, they’ll be asked to refuel.”
This is in marked contrast to the classroom environment, she says: “When they’re in the classroom and a teacher says ‘Pay attention, you’re not listening,’ they probably believe they are. But what you’re seeing here is, ‘Did you move that backwards? That’s your attention – you weren’t concentrating. Let’s bring your focus back in.’ They can start to see attention as something concrete and controllable.”
Play Attention was developed in 1996 by a former teacher, Peter Freer, and is based on the refinement of a concept known as ‘neurofeedback’, a clinical methodology that uses an EEG to measure electrical activity in the brain. The information is sent to a computer where it is displayed as a graph, giving the user feedback about their brain activity. Play Attention’s version of this is called ‘edufeedback’ and is, to quote the Play Attention website, an “integration of feedback technology with proven educational methodologies and behavioural shaping techniques”. The idea is that even children with severe ADHD can be trained to improve their concentration and memory. In the US, the technology is used in about 400 schools.
Typically, a programme of use consists of at least two half-hour sessions a week, for nine or ten months. In each session, a child will play five games, covering the skills of attention stamina (maintaining attention for a set period of time); visual tracking (following a moving object with the eyes); attention on task (completing a task within a given timeframe); memory sequencing (remembering a sequence of information); and discriminatory processing (the ability to use relevant information and discard irrelevant information). All these areas are ones that ADHD sufferers typically have problems with, says Zara.
At the end of a game, the parent or teacher is provided with data about how the child performed. The data can be used to set targets for the next session and to identify the problem areas and focus on eliminating them.
But does it work? A sceptic might argue that even children with terrible attention problems in the classroom don’t find it hard to concentrate on exciting computer games. Zara points out that the Play Attention games are “low stimulation”: they don’t have the noise, frenetic activity and stimulating graphics of many traditional computer games.
The real test, however, is whether the child’s ability to pay attention improves outside the confines of the games themselves. The small amount of research in the area seems to offer support for the theory that attention can be improved through this kind of training, though more needs to be done.
Anecdotally, Zara has seen a marked improvement in the ability of her daughter, now 10, to concentrate and focus, and is starting to see improvement in the children who have been coming to the Games for Life centre. In one case, a child with severe ADHD has been attending the centre on Mondays and Wednesdays, and her teacher, not knowing this, remarked to her parents that the child was displaying marked improvement in her attention on a Tuesday and Thursday.
Another child has used the techniques she learnt during her Play Attention sessions to help her through an exam: “One of the games is about getting a character to the bottom of the ocean to collect coins, and literally you take a deep breath, relax and focus on the character. There’s no other interaction, you just keep it down by using your focus. And [before the exam] she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and saw herself going down under the water.”
So what next? Zara sees three potential markets: parents who want to use the technology at home or in the centre; schools; and clinics. Many parents are already unhappy with drug-based treatments, and recent guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) state that educational programmes should be used in preference to drugs in the treatment of ADHD. Zara is about to demonstrate the equipment to a unit dealing with brain injuries, and the firm has also had some interest from schools in Manchester.
The technology can also be used with adults and children without a diagnosis of ADHD, but who nonetheless have problems concentrating – both Zara and Ian have used it to improve their own ability to pay attention. It is too early to say how much impact the technology will have in the UK, but the innovation of using brain activity to control computer software is likely to interest both educators and health professionals. It certainly appeals to children, says Zara: “It’s fantastic. They all think they’re Yoda or Harry Potter.”