Attention Is a Behavior—So Start Treating It Like One
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And on to this week’s message!
People can walk into the same room and see two completely different things. You see the comfy leather couch. They see the weird ceramic cat statue on the windowsill.
Same room. Different experience.
Why? You’ve heard me hammer away at this before: You don’t simply attend to things. Your learning history filters for and informs you on what to attend to in any given situation. Attention isn’t simply about what’s there—It’s about what you bring with you from your past.
Let me back up and tell you a story. Humor me as you may have heard me talk about it before.
One Halloween several years back, one of my neighbors went all out. Complete with skeletons, fake blood, and ghosts hanging from trees in the front-yard. Of course, they also live right at the corner on a four way stop. That means families with gawking toddlers—just like my own—are forced to drive by slowly and look at the friendly floating corpses hanging from the trees.
Anyway—I'm driving past this house with my son in the back seat. At this point in time he wasn’t even two and had developed a healthy obsession with all things basketball related (which he still has). We slowly drove passed the house. I noticed he was looking out the window. I braced myself.
“DID YOU SEE THAT, DAD?!” His voice shrieked.
Here it comes, I think. The ghost. The fear. The nightmares.
“That house had a big, BIG basset-baw hoop!”
Delighted, I indulged him in the conversation. I was relieved that the ghost didn’t register with him at all. Despite its unavoidable salience, he was laser-locked on a basketball hoop that was three houses away.
That moment has always stuck with me. It’s stimulus control in action.
Same scene. Two completely different “most important” things.
He saw joy. I saw future therapy bills. As always, his attention was “basketball oriented”. As always, mine was “child-safety oriented”.
And this—this is everything when it comes to our learners.
Our learners walk through a world overflowing with input. Ghosts. Basketballs. Sounds. Lights. Movements. Words. Expectations. Reinforcement. Distractions. That’s a lot for anyone—but especially for our kids.
If we don’t teach them what to attend to, guess what? They’ll pick whatever feels loudest or most familiar. In my example above, it was heartwarming. But, what they attend to is not always the most helpful choice.
(Shoutout to every learner who can spot the snack cabinet from 100 yards but still doesn’t notice when you say their name.)
I’ll bring it home with something familiar: driving.
When you first rode in a car, you probably noticed everything. Trees. People walking. Dogs. Basketball hoops. But eventually, you trained your attention.
When you go from riding in a car to driving in a car, your values and priorities change. Suddenly, someone else isn’t responsible for your safety…you are. Subsequently, what you attend to changes. You learn to look for stoplights, speed limit signs, other cars, turn signals, curbs, etc. These stimuli matter way more than they did before when you were a rider.
Now imagine if we taught driving without being this sensitive to the newly oriented attention of the learner. No road signs, no street signs, no speed limit signs, no curbs. Just a total reliance on hoping that all of those crazy drivers out there get it and just drive safely.
That would not work.
We have to have the signs, the signals, the boundaries, the lines, and the curbs. For those new drivers out there (if not for us old ones as well), it would be a disaster if we didn’t.
And yet, BCBAs often throw a program at a learner and make adjustments without considering what that kiddo is attending to (and why) and what that kiddo NEEDS to attend to to get it right (and why).
As BCBAs: We are the civil engineers—aka the people that design our streets and street signs— of programming.
We have to build the signs, light up the pathways, and remove the noise for our kiddos.
So, I have a few recommendations!
1. Know the things that are STEALING their attention!
There are dozens of stimuli fighting for your learner’s attention at any given moment. Half of them will derail the session or program if you let them. Recognize what is loud and distracting and hone your ability to identify this “clutter”. Is it a loud noise? Bright light? A workspace filled with too many preferred stimuli? Too many peers? Know the things that are STEALING their attention.
2. Know the stuff that they NEED to attend to to WIN at that program!
You, as the BCBA, need to know exactly what matters most in the skill you're teaching. What are the core features of that skill? If you’re teaching shapes, it’s the number of sides. If you’re teaching kitchens, it’s the appliances and furniture. If you’re teaching them to put on a shirt, it’s the sleeves and the tag.
3. Program their attention accordingly.
Then, drill your learner on those core features. Write programs that build stimulus control by highlighting the right cues, not just presenting the skill. Have them count the sides of the shape before identifying it. Have them name the appliances in the picture before they tell you whether it’s a kitchen or a bathroom. Have them point to the tag on the back of the shirt before they lay it out and try to put it on.
Attention is everything! Become a student of it!
Pass this along to a colleague who geeks out about this stuff too.
And don’t forget to subscribe for more practical, clinical storytelling every week—BCBA life and the nuances that go with don’t completely live in a graph.
Martin Myers is a BCBA with a passion for helping improve the field of ABA. He is the creator of BxMastery, with over 4,000 goal ideas, sequenced, to inspire your programming. With 10+ years of experience in the field, he’s dedicated to empowering others and fostering positive change through effective leadership and communication. Connect with Martin on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for more insights and updates.