Leveraging Vision, Errors in Motor Performance and Timing to Improve Attention
Julia Grover-Barrey OTR/L
Founder of In-Tuned®
Yes, the title is a mouth full and I’m going to cut to the chase by first recommending you watch Huberman Lab Podcast #37: ADHD & How Anyone Can Improve Their Focus.
If you are a parent, teacher or caregiver of someone with an ADHD diagnosis, or in the absence of formal diagnosis has poor attention interfering with their occupational performance, and in some cases, safety, watch or listen to Andrew Huberman, PhD provide the most up to date research on medications, supplements and behavioral tools for improving attention and focus along with comprehensive discussion on the neural circuitry and neurochemistry involved.
As an occupational therapist working with students and a mother of two teenage daughters with Smartphones, I have a lot of experience with attentional deficits. I work with many students with ADHD as a primary diagnosis, but also those with attention deficits secondary to downstream effects of a global developmental delay. And then there are those who have self-induced attention deficits from device use. All you have to do is look around and see the numbers of distracted people staring at their phones while walking in a crosswalk, driving a vehicle or carrying a baby on their hip through a busy airport to see how this could lead to harmful consequences.
Attentional deficits impact our occupational performance in a number of ways from reducing productivity, interference with laying down new learning, impairment in working memory, ability to organize ourselves and our environment, to how we form social relationships.
The consequences of inattention go beyond impacting the individual, their family and their teachers, but has a higher societal consequence. We need more people organizing around and completing tasks to solve tangible, real world problems.
I have developed a visual targeting and attention program I use with my students to work on focused attention. There are several stages to the program, involving moving from static visual targets, to moving visual targets, multiple moving targets and then adding a motor performance component providing opportunities to make errors, consequences to those errors, making adjustments in position, pressure and timing to improve success rate all of which forces the student to PAY ATTENTION.
Please join me this afternoon, Wednesday September 29, 2021 from 5:30-6:30 pm Arizona time. Click here to register: https://www.in-tunedchild.com/trainings) to discuss developmental ocular motor skills, as well as this topic related to visual attention where I will go through the protocol I use with my students to improve focus.
Julia