Paying Attention to Attention: The Instructor-Instructee Cognitive Quandary

Attention may well be one of the single most complex elements of human cognition. Like the young pupils described by Maria Edgeworth in her comprehensive study of attention in an educational environment, how, exactly, can any person selectively apply their attention to the plethora of stimuli present throughout our world, and successfully manage to not become desperately overwhelmed by the prospect of retaining or benefiting from any single observation? This perplexing inquiry relates poignantly to the timeless philosophical query of “whether attention was directed voluntarily or involuntarily towards objects and events” (P & J, 4). Through several anecdotes offered on the matter, each one framing the discussion in a slightly different setting, Edgeworth seems to suggest that these are not mutually exclusive options for the mysterious function of attention as it pertains to the larger issue of human cognition. On the one hand, passively strolling through space and time, seemingly oblivious to one’s surroundings, and only occasionally noting peculiar or exceptional instances, and largely by chance, at that, a person could be said to be engaged in involuntarily attention. On the other, a person might be said to be participating in a voluntary use of attention, conscientiously taking in every detail (or as many as possible given the circumstances) with a concerted effort directed towards the accumulation of useful and advantageous discoveries of the world within which we exist. While this may have seemed to philosophers, at some point in human history, as a logical and, furthermore, necessary distinction, it seems to be Edgeworth’s stance on the matter that this divergence in behavior and cognitive activity are more accurately described as stages of one’s educational development, as opposed merely to representing one’s cognitive type or individualism.

In discussing the most appropriate manner with which to educate a student on new material, Edgeworth mentions the important distinction between the perspective of an educator and that of a pupil. One must not forget that a child learning something for the first time is seeing the topic of focus in a fundamentally different way from the instructor who likely knows the contents of the lesson like the back of her hand. As Edgeworth informs us, “we often expect, that those whom we are teaching should know some things intuitively, because these may have been so long known to us that we forget how we learned them” (E, 3). That is not to say that, through time and exposure, our reliance on attention is at all diminished. Nor is it fair to conclude that the student requires the use of any more or less attention than the teacher to accomplish the same task. Rather, the student is simply in a different, and much earlier, stage of applying attention to the task at hand, and, in turn, is also at an infant stage of interpreting the data collected by the attention that has been invested in said task. A teacher may have forgotten how she has come to know so well something so complicated, and she may, as a result, view a student’s difficulty to grasp the subject matter as a failure to apply the requisite attention, but it is, in actuality, the same amount of attention being applied by both parties (assuming a standard of commitment and initiative on behalf of both, but especially on the pupil). It seems to be different, and drastically so at that, due to the simple explanation that repetition, rather than diminishing the necessary attention invested into a given task, simply deceives the practitioner into feeling as though less attention is required. In reality, the same level of attention is applied to the task for both teacher and student, although it has, through innumerable reiteration, become second nature to the educator, while it remains a mystifying puzzle to the pupil, due to an utter lack of contact with the material in question.