Selective attention as a basis for learning in students at UNIANDES University

Abstract

Sustained attention requires an observer to maintain involvement in a specific task for a prolonged period of time, while selective attention allows individuals to extract relevant information, ignoring distracting stimuli; the previous attentional system would be an executive mechanism, which would make the object being attended to and its properties conscious, to ensure that the established goals are met. One of the problems that affects university students is related to selective attention difficulties, as they are easily distracted; the selection of internal information of the human processing system is also involved, information in the form of knowledge and its interrelationships or selective attention, understood as the ability to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. The objective of the research was to characterize selective attention in the learning process of Dentistry students at UNIANDES University. It was concluded that students do not have study habits and there are selective attention difficulties; they do not adapt to academic demands and choose to do what is easiest; they do not manage to relate their knowledge with the new knowledge acquired, nor organize the new information; they do not seek new learning methods to overcome their teaching results, nor sustain attention for long enough, which is more evident in difficult contents.

Keywords: selective attention, learning, knowledge, academic performance