Bringing Attention to Education: Revisiting the Neural Mechanisms of Selective Attention in Naturalistic Learning

In the context of education, attention can be considered the gateway for learning. Cortical attention mechanisms may help explain, in a precise and mechanistic manner, crucial educational modulators that are essential to effective learning and relevant to constructs that are essential to developing learners. Bringing cortical attention mechanisms into dialogue with educational practice, however, raises a fundamental challenge: which of the multitude of proposed cortical mechanisms that have been operationalized within the context of the lab are most relevant to classroom learning? Here we seek to address this challenge via attentional manipulation of EEG signals produced by middle school students as they experience an authentic novel instructional session within their school. First, we work with practitioners to co-construct naturalistic auditory and visual educational streams of information, and then manipulate student audio-visual learning priorities to examine the effects on the temporal dynamics of EEG signals linked to their teacher’s voice. We conduct temporal response function analyses across whole-topography components to help differentiate the relevance of early (e.g. early acting sensory modulation) versus late (biased competition or conflict resolution) attention mechanisms. Significant attentional modulation of speech processing emerged at only 170 ms, lending support to late but not early selection mechanisms. Moreover, individual differences in such cortical attention effects proved to be relevant to learning abilities and to teacher impressions of how well each student was able to engage during real classes. These approaches to naturalistic EEG within schools may guide selection of candidate mechanisms of attention within future research that seeks to leverage mechanistic insights from cognitive neuroscience to improve educational practice.