The Child and his Behavior. A. R. Luria

The Cultural Development of Special Functions: Attention

We shall now dwell very briefly on the phases of the development of attention in the child. We know that attention performs a most important function in the life of the organism: that of the organization of behavior, the creation of a suitable disposition preparing the individual for action or perception. Were it not for the function of disposition, man would be incapable of perceiving stimuli from the environment in an organized way, and singling out those of greatest importance to a particular situation; nor would he be able to organize his reactions in an appropriate system, singling out the most important motions and arranging them in a certain order.

We can see attention already at work in the very young. Natural attention may be observed in the first few weeks of life, being caused by a variety of sufficiently powerful stimuli. It is only to be expected that a powerful external stimulus, such as a bright light or loud sound, organizes the whole of behavior accordingly; the child turns his head, and specific mimicry of attention manifests itself. This is exactly how powerful internal stimuli of an instinctive nature operate. Even in the very youngest child, hunger elicits a number of specific reactions. The undifferentiated state somewhere between sleeping and waking is replaced by a series of coordinated motions, as the child reaches for the mother’s breast; all extraneous motions recede, and the whole of the child’s behavior is made equally subordinate to this dominant stimulus. Such is the effect of the simplest form of natural attention, which is usually known as the instinctive-reflex kind.

This kind of attention characteristically is not arbitrary; any sudden, powerful stimulus promptly attracts the attention of the child and alters his behavior. On the other hand, as soon as there is any weakening of the stimulus (which may, for example, be internal or instinctive), the organizing role of attention fades away, and organized behavior again yields to unorganized, undifferentiated behavior.

Such a natural type of attention cannot, of course, generate any durable, stable form of organized behavior. Each new stimulus would repeatedly disrupt the disposition, causing repeated changes in behavior. These conditions clearly fail to satisfy the organism until it is removed from social demands, away from the community and from work. However, when certain demands begin to be made on the individual, when he is obliged to perform a certain organized task, however primitive, his primitive non-arbitrary attention proves inadequate, and it proves necessary to elaborate new and more stable forms of behavior.

Such further development of attention can clearly not involve the development of non-arbitrary attention. In order to perform the task required of him, the individual must first elaborate a mode of behavior that will be the exact opposite of his former mode. Previously, each powerful stimulus had been able to organize behavior on its own terms, by generating a certain disposition; now, however, weaker but biologically or socially important stimuli, requiring a lengthy organized chain of reactions, would need to do the same. Natural forms of attention could not satisfy these demands, so certain other artificial, acquired mechanisms would have to develop alongside them, in order to resolve the situation. There was a need for arbitrary artificial – that is, “civilized” – attention, which is the essential component of any work.

Let us now try to explore the process of transition to such forms of attention, if only with regard to the solution of certain problems. None of the conditions influencing non-arbitrary, natural attention has any effect on the student in this instance. The problems proposed are not in themselves a stimulus powerful enough to focus the attention and they do not fall into the area of some instinctive process capable of organizing all of the behavior of the personality; yet the student can resolve minor problems in quite an organized way and for quite a long time by concentrating on them alone, with no distractions. From the standpoint of natural forms of behavior, this may seem enigmatic. We can find the key to this enigma only by finding certain forces that bolster attention while certain work is in progress and whose effect is long-lasting.

According to the old psychology, arbitrary attention was attributable to the effect of the will; in fact it was considered as the very archetype of volitional behavior. One hardly need point out, however, that such an explanation is inadequate, as the phenomenon “will” itself needs to be explained, and is not a final, independent factor.

We may assume that the child’s developing experience of life itself creates certain new, additional stimuli not present at birth and which become increasingly significant, together with the natural stimuli of behavior. Cultural conditions (broadly defined as the entire complex of social conditions of the environment, school, factory and professional situations influencing the child) begin to generate certain “quasi-requirements”, or states of tension that induce activity and disappear only when such organized activity is completed. This artificial, cultural stimulation of behavior forms a powerful apparatus that influences the personality and organizes its activity. The child learns how to act in accordance with a set problem and how to set such problems for himself to accomplish. Each of these problems causes serious changes in the structure of behavior; they generate a certain tension impelling a person to carry out a series of actions aimed at solving the problem. Traces of past experience, emotionally embellished, strengthen this cultural stimulation. If the problem itself is clear and fits into a precise pattern, and if the paths leading to its solution are plainly delineated, then the stimuli leading to its organized implementation will be correspondingly stronger and more persistent. A number of experiments recently conducted at the Berlin Psychological Institute have shown that the interruption of any goal-oriented action artificially induces a certain tension that compels the individual, at the first opportunity, to set about solving the problem, overcoming serious obstacles in the process.

The cultural stimuli thus generated enable the individual to concentrate on a certain activity, sometimes overcoming even serious distracting obstacles. However, besides complicating the dynamic conditions and creating new needs in the form of culturally grafted “attractions”, the influence of the historical environment also acts by organizing in one further respect. The child develops specific devices, that enable him to control his psychological operations, to separate the substantial from the insubstantial, and to perceive complex situations as being subject to certain basic central factors. By developing culturally, the child himself also becomes able to create such stimuli, which will in due course influence him, organize his behavior, and attract his attention.

There is no doubt that the first of these factors, as we have found time and time again, is an indication from other persons, and speech. To begin with, the child perceives his surroundings diffusely; but as soon as his mother points to and names a certain object, it promptly stands out among those surroundings and becomes the focus of the child’s attention. For the first time, the process of attention here becomes a function of a cultural operation. This does not really happen, however, until the child himself has mastered the technique of creating such additional stimuli, which enable him to concentrate on some parts of the situation, detaching them from the rest of the background. Through external manipulations the child begins at a certain point to organize his own psychological processes pertaining to attention.

How does this complex cultural action of attention take place? What devices does the child use in order to continue to focus his attention on a certain activity, and what structure does that act of “arbitrary attention” acquire? The analysis of one example will help us understand this process. We have taken it from the experiments conducted in our laboratory by our colleague, A. N. Leontiev.[32]

A child aged 8-9 years is given a problem requiring him to concentrate and focus his sustained and intense attention on a certain process: he is given a series of questions, including some to which the answer will involve naming a certain color. These might be, for example: Do you go to school? What color is the desk? Do you like to play? Have you ever been in the country? What color is grass? Have you ever been in a hospital? Have you seen a doctor? What color smocks do they wear?

The child has to answer the questions as quickly as possible, while abiding by the following rules: 1) he must not name the same color twice and 2) he must not name two colors (such as black and white). The experiment is arranged so as to make this possible, but the problem requires constant, intense attention.

The experiment showed that the child is unable to solve the problem without resorting to various auxiliary devices. He invariably becomes distracted, disregarding some aspect of the instructions and loses on account of his inability to organize his behavior in a sustained and complete manner to match the problem at hand.

How can his attention be strengthened, and how can he be helped to master his behavior without departing from any of the conditions he has to meet? The experiment showed that the only way this could be done was by shifting from immediate to mediate attention, which resorts to the use of certain external devices.

To help the child solve the problem we offer him colored cards that he may use as notes, as external conditions for the organization of his attention. We thereby hand him a certain device, which he quickly masters. His external actions help him to organize his attention: by operating with these cards externally, he organizes his internal processes.

The result is soon evident: at once, or after one or two attempts, the child achieves the necessary level of organization of attention and wins the game. What conditions are necessary in order for all the requirements attached to the experiment to be met? By displaying the auxiliary means we can determine this with sufficient objectivity.

In one series of experiments, the child behaves as follows in order to solve the “do not say white and black” problem: he lays out the cards in front of him (Figure 29), then picks out the black and white cards and sets them aside, face down at first, thereby showing that they have been removed from his field of vision (B). As a rule, however, this psychological method of organizing the attention fails to yield the desired results: to be successful, the child, instead of removing the forbidden elements from the sphere of his attention, must make the process of attention mediate, concentrating precisely on those forbidden elements. Test subjects usually guess that this is what they need to do: they take the two cards with the forbidden colors and lay them out in front of them (C,a). In such instances when the child is asked a question requiring a color as an answer, he does not answer immediately, but first glances at the “forbidden” cards, checking to see whether he might answer with a forbidden color, and only then chooses an answer avoiding the forbidden colors. The very structure of the process has clearly been altered: organized attention has changed the course of the thinking itself. Instead of answering “grass is green”, the child (being forbidden to mention the color green) answers: “grass is yellow (in autumn)”. Here the prohibition of one color organizes the inhibition of certain answers, and steers the child toward new situations and a new roundabout way of thinking.

fig 29

The use of cards as auxiliary symbols does not, however, end there: in order to solve the second problem, not to repeat the same colors twice, the child selects from the cards in front of him, one corresponding to the question asked (for example, a yellow one), and, as a way of signalling that that color has already been mentioned, he moves the card slightly lower down; then before answering the questions, he looks at both rows of forbidden colors (C, rows a and c), and then, having made the process mediate, he successfully avoids all the pitfalls in the experiment. External “operations” transform and organize the process of attention.

Yet the process goes further than this. If we were to give the child the same game to play several times, we would probably notice changes in his behavior. He would soon stop using the cards, and begin to solve the problem without external auxiliary devices, returning, as it were, to the previous natural application of attention. This is only apparently so, however. We can see that the child now succeeds in solving a problem that he had previously been unable to resolve: he successfully circumvents all the obstacles placed in his way by the rules.

How is one to account for this change in the child’s behavior? On closer examination we find that the process of his attention is still mediate; however, instead of externally mediate, it has now become internally mediate. Having learned how to use auxiliary tools in the form of the external material of the cards, the child elaborates a series of internal auxiliary devices. Instead of spreading out the forbidden cards before him, he mentally records those two forbidden colors (optically, or, better still, vocally) and then makes his answers on the basis of those two recorded colors. A device elaborated in external operations thus alters the internal structure of the process, by elaborating a system of internal stimuli and devices. Two factors make this version of the transformation of external into internal processes highly plausible: 1) the similar transformation of the process of mnemotechnical memorization, that we have observed in our experiments; and 2) the behavior of the older child, who substitutes internal recording for the external manipulation of cards when solving the same problem. These devices, its. mediate character and the fact of internal recording are specific features of the process of “cultural attention” which seemed rather incomprehensible to us for a long time.

Such experiments have solved much that had been obscure in the problem of operations connected with attention. It becomes quite obvious that we ought to seek the specific traits of attention precisely in operations involving certain stimuli and symbols that make the process mediate, and serve to indicate, record and highlight. These stimuli may be natural (as in the case of the natural center of a perceived structure), but the development of these means primarily involves the elaboration of new devices of cultural behavior and new organizing symbols, and their further use. We can visualize the main milestones along the road travelled by man as he shifted from primitive, natural forms of attention to complex cultural forms, and we believe that further research will reveal new aspects and details of this process.