Lecture 1: Attention

In this part, we will focus on the issues of perception and attention and some clinical implications in dental practice.

After this course, you will learn:

• Define key concepts about attention
• Recognize the importance of multisensory integration in oral functions

Can we really ‘control’ our attention?

In fact, this is a very complicated question. Since attentional control is associated with both bottom-up and top-down processing, it is very hard to answer the question above. From the point of information processing, when you ‘shift’ attention to something, you need to disengage from the things you have already paid attention to. And in order to do that, we need to disengage with an old target and to engage with a new target. It is very important to pain management for dental patients.

Patients won’t listen to me!

We often blame this on, say, patients are too impatient or they don’t get our language. Really? Maybe sometimes it is simply a problem of attention – our messages are not salient enough to catch their attention.

Try this:

• Minimize the things that distract patients’ attention from dentists
• Give patients some breaks while giving some instruction to them