How Emotions and Memories Focus Our Attention
Attention is a complex cognitive process that allows us to focus on specific stimuli while filtering out others. It is essential for learning, decision-making, and social interaction.
The nervous system plays a crucial role in attention by integrating information from different sensory modalities, such as vision, hearing, and touch, as well as from memory and emotion. This integration allows us to select the most relevant information and ignore irrelevant distractions.
Several brain regions are involved in attention, including the prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe, and the thalamus.
- 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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Emotions and attention are deeply connected in the developing brain. Children pay attention to what matters emotionally to them — what they love, fear, or find meaningful. Dr. Greenspan’s core insight was that emotional investment drives attention, which drives learning. This is why Floortime begins with the child’s interests: what captures their emotion captures their attention.
Memory is most strongly encoded when an experience has emotional significance. Children remember things that made them feel joyful, surprised, or connected — not things they were made to repeat by rote. The Greenspan Floortime Approach leverages this by creating emotionally meaningful interactions that children want to remember and repeat, building learning through connection.
The Greenspan Floortime Approach is grounded in the understanding that emotional engagement drives all development. By following the child’s lead into play they love, Floortime creates emotionally charged interactions that naturally capture and sustain attention. This is more effective than structured drills because emotionally meaningful experiences are the ones that shape the developing brain.
Children with autism often have differences in how they process and regulate emotions, which can affect attention, memory, and engagement. The Greenspan/DIR Model works with these differences by creating calm, regulated emotional states through warm relational interactions — establishing the emotional safety that allows attention and memory to function optimally.