How Emotions and Memories Focus Our Attention

• The prefrontal cortex is responsible for decision-making, planning, and working memory. It also plays a role in attention by selecting and maintaining relevant information.
• The parietal lobe is involved in spatial awareness and attention. The thalamus acts as a relay station for sensory information, filtering out irrelevant information and sending the rest to the appropriate brain regions, like the prefrontal cortex.
• The hippocampus is involved in memory formation and retrieval. It also plays a role in attention by helping to link current experiences to past memories. This allows us to recognize and focus on familiar stimuli.

The interaction of these brain structures allows the nervous system to focus on the most relevant stimuli. This can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as our current goals, our emotional state, and our past experiences.

Emotions and the Entorhinal Cortex and Hippocampus

A new study has found that there is a direct feedback loop between the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. This circuit allows the brain to prioritize important information. The circuit tags sights and sounds linked to certain objects and places as more important, or less.  It also highlights how past experiences (memories) and our emotional perception of those experiences impact the way our brain responds to (attends to) different sensory stimulus.  Essentially, if we enjoyed something we are more likely to  “tune into it”, attend to it, in the future.  Conversely, if we didn’t “like” something and are disinterested, stressed, and/or aggravated by it, then we may ignore it, “tune it out”, or hyper-focus/ruminate .  What this new research highlights, is that this “focusing mechanism” occurs at a neurological level where our brains wiring directs our attention is based on our emotional perception of previous experiences, and that inattentiveness is not simply a behavioral issue.  (https://neurosciencenews.com/familiar-important-background-neuroscience-24832/)

How Greenspan Floortime Naturally Works on Strengthening Social Attention

Greenspan Floortime is a developmental approach that focuses on building meaningful relationships through child directed play, improving social-emotional health in children with developmental, social, and behavioral differences, like autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Children with developmental differences can have difficulty with self-regulation, communication, socializing, and adaptability because they integrate sensory information, memories, and emotions in different ways when compared to “neurotypical” children.  Dr. Greenspan’s frameworks provides caregivers and professionals a way to understand these differences and how to create environments and navigate key relationships to support these individual differences.   

Greenspan Floortime involves a variety of principles and techniques designed to help children strengthen their social emotional health, specifically Shared Attention. These principles include:

• Joining the Child’s World to Create a Shared World: This involves finding activities that both the child and the therapist enjoy. This can help to create a bond and encourage social interaction.
• Encouraging Communication, not just Language: This involves using facial expressions to communicate with the child. This helps to teach children with ASD how to interpret and use facial expressions.
• Following the Child’s Lead: Respecting a child’s needs, interests, communications while encouraging shared attention associates meaningful positive emotional perceptions with the relationship between the child and the caregiver. Memories of these experiences and feelings will encourage or discourage future attentiveness.
• Co-Regulating: This involves meaningfully interacting with the child during activities. This helps children learn self-regulation, sustained engagement, communication, and social skills.
• Encouraging the Child to DO the Thinking: This involves encouraging the child to come up with the next step or idea, be creative, problem-solve, and adapt.

Conclusion

Attention is a complex cognitive process that is essential for survival. It is focused by the nervous system through the integration of sensory information, memories, and emotions. Greenspan Floortime is a developmental therapy approach that can help children with ASD develop social attention.

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