Attention management

Attention management refers to models and tools for supporting the management of attention at the individual or at the collective level (cf. attention economy), and at the short-term (quasi real time) or at a longer term (over periods of weeks or months).

Different studies have been conducted in using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for supporting attention, and in particular, models have been elaborated for supporting attention (Davenport & Beck 2001)(Roda & Nabeth 2008).

Supporting the management of attention objective is to bring a certain number of solutions to:

• people perception cognitive limitations, such as the limited capacity of the human short-term memory (an average number of 4 items (Cowan 2001) can be managed at a given time), or the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships (the Dunbar's number of 150).
• information overload
• social interaction overload (that may for instance originate from the online social networking services from which people get a lot of solicitations)
• interruption (Kebinger 2005)
• multitasking (Rosen 2008)

Tools can be designed for supporting attention

• at the organizational level, by supporting organization processes (Apostolou, Karapiperis & Stojanovic 2008)
• at the collective level
• at the individual level, for instance using attentive user interfaces (Vertegaal 2003) (Vertegaal et al. 2006) (Huberman & Wu 2008).
• at the individual level by helping people to assess and analyze their attention related practices (for instance with the tool AttentionScape (Davenport,Beck 2001)).

These tools are often adaptive hypermedia, and often rely on profiling the user (Nabeth 2008) in order determine how to better support people's attention.

Projects

A certain number of projects have been conducted to investigate how to use ICT to support attention such as:

• AtGentive – Attentive Agents for Collaborative Learners.
• SAKE – Semantic-enabled Agile Knowledge-based eGovernment (IST 027128)
• SUITOR (Maglio et al. 2000)

See also

• Adaptive hypermedia
• Attention
• Attention economy
• Attentive user interface
• Information overload
• Personal information management
• Time management
• User modeling

External links

• AtGentiveWatch: Attention
• Attention and Productivity Management Tools: TimeOP