O estudo concreto da atenção e seu desenvolvimento em contexto escolar / The concrete study of attention and development in schools

Diante da necessidade da superação de propostas organicistas e medicalizantes para a compreensão de supostos transtornos neurobiológicos relacionados a queixas de desatenção e hiperatividade/impulsividade, lançou-se mão neste artigo de referenciais do materialismo histórico-dialético e psicologia histórico-cultural, objetivando sistematizar a organização metodológica desenvolvida na tese de doutorado de Ferracioli (2018), no sentido de um estudo empírico no campo da psicologia concreta. Através de experimento formativo com coleta de dados em campo junto a alunos/as e professoras do segundo ano do Ensino Fundamental de uma escola municipal, identificou-se os determinantes pedagógicos responsáveis por melhor promover o desenvolvimento da atenção voluntária em contexto escolar. No entanto, o foco deste artigo está direcionado para os procedimentos elaborados para esta investigação, apresentados em três momentos fundamentais: empírico, abstrato e concreto. Os resultados indicaram que a atenção voluntária é consequência do ensino, observando-se significativa ampliação das capacidades atencionais e escolares dos sujeitos participantes, o que permitiu ao pesquisador constatar, no cerne dessas mudanças, a centralidade do processo de internalização de signos/conteúdos na atividade de estudo, assim como indicar formas de organização do ensino mais apropriadas ao desenvolvimento da atenção voluntária. Por fim, a partir dos resultados, fez-se uma crítica à cientificidade de concepções organicistas e medicalizantes em educação.

Faced with the need to overcome organicist and medicalizing proposals for the understanding of supposed neurobiological disorders related to complaints of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsiveness, this article uses references from historical-dialectic materialism and historical-cultural psychology, aiming to systematize the methodological organization developed in Ferracioli's (2018) doctoral thesis, in the sense of an empirical study in the field of concrete psychology. Through a formative experiment with data collection in the field with students and teachers of the second year of elementary school in a municipal school, we identified the pedagogical determinants responsible for better promoting the development of voluntary attention in a school context. However, the focus of this article directed to the procedures developed for this investigation, presented in three fundamental moments: empirical, abstract and concrete. The results indicated voluntary attention is a consequence of teaching. We observed a significant increase in the attentional and school capacities of the participating subjects, which allowed the researcher to verify, at the core of these changes, the centrality of the process of internalization of signs/contents in the study activity. In addition, we could indicate ways of organizing teaching more appropriate to the development of voluntary attention. Finally, based on the results, we performed a critique on the scientificity of organicist and medicalizing conceptions in education.

Lateral asymmetry of voluntary attention orienting

We recently demonstrated that automatic attention favors the right side of space and, in the present study, we investigated whether voluntary attention also favors this side. Six reaction time experiments were conducted. In each experiment, 12 new 18-25-year-old male right-handed individuals were tested. In Experiments 1, 2, 3 (a, b) and 4 (a, b), tasks with increasing attentional demands were used. In Experiments 1, 2, 3a, and 4a, attention was oriented to one or both sides by means of a central spatially informative visual cue. A left or right side visual target appeared 100, 300, or 500 ms later. Attentional effects were observed in the four experiments. In Experiments 2, 3a and 4a, these effects were greater when the cue indicated the right side than when it indicated the left side (respectively: 16 ± 10 and 44 ± 6 ms, P = 0.015, for stimulus onset asynchrony of 500 ms in Experiment 2; 38 ± 10 and 70 ± 7 ms, P = 0.011, for Experiment 3a, and 23 ± 11 and 61 ± 10 ms, P = 0.009, for Experiment 4a). In Experiments 3b and 4b, the central cue pointed to both sides and was said to be non-relevant for task performance. In these experiments right and left reaction times did not differ. The most conservative interpretation of the present findings is that voluntary attention orienting favors the right side of space, particularly when a difficult task has to be performed.

Voluntary modulations of attention in a semantic auditory-visual matching Task: an ERP study

The present study explores the neural correlates of voluntary modulations of attention in an auditory-visual matching task. Visual stimuli (a female or a male face) were preceded in close temporal proximity by auditory stimuli consisting of the Spanish word for "man" and "woman" ("hombre" or "mujer"). In 80 percent of the trials the gender of the two stimuli coincided. Participants were asked to mentally count the specific instances in which a female face appeared after hearing the word "man" (10 percent of the trials). Our results show attention-related amplitude modulation of the early visual ERP components NI and anterior P2, but also amplitude modulations of (i) the N270 potential usually associated with conflict detection, (ii) a P300 wave related to infrequency, and (iii) an N400 potential related to semantic incongruence. The elicitation of these latter components varied according to task manipulations, evidencing the role of voluntary allocation of attention in fine-tuning cognitive processing, which includes basic processes like detection of infrequency or semantic incongruity often considered to be volition-independent.