Sue Haug, Associate Professor of Music at Iowa State University, teaches piano and piano pedagogy and is head of the Department of Music. She has been on the ISU music faculty since 1975 and has served as department head since 1991. She holds undergraduate and masters degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Iowa. Dr. Haug performs regularly as soloist and accompanist. Most recently she and colleagues at ISU have developed (and toured with) an original music-drama on the life and music of Clara Schumann and a sequel, on the music of Johannes Brahms. She has also presented many lecture-recitals, including J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations and the music and life of various composers such as Lili Boulanger, Edvard Grieg, Clara Wieck Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, and Franz Liszt. Her research has focused most recently on sight-reading at the piano and cognitive psychology as it applies to the learning of music.
Sue Haug
School of Music
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
shaug@iastate.edu
515.294.5364
"Everyone knows what attention is" wrote William James in Principles of Psychology, 1890. From the piano teacher who is concerned about the young student squirming on the piano bench, to the university lecturer who tries to keep the interest of her 8:00 a.m. class, to the exhausted student who drinks a pot of coffee in hopes of studying all night - everyone knows first-hand when attention lapses. We say that people "pay attention" or "command attention" or "give their attention." These verbs (pay, command, give) indicate an active process where the attendee makes a choice to attend to something. In cognitive psychology (cognitive psychology is the study of the processes governing human thought; how people acquire and use knowledge) attention is usually discussed in terms of allocating cognitive resources. This may involve selectivity (determining what to attend to) and concentration (the amount of mental effort required for a task).
Although people try to attend to several things at once, our ability to do so is clearly limited. An important theory regarding such cognitive limits is called the capacity model of attention. Psychologists use models and flow charts to illustrate their theories of how our cognitive mechanism works. The models of attention attempt to explain the limitations of attention, how the selection process may work and what causes failures. Capacity models of attention are particularly instructive for music educators who deal regularly with limits of students' attention as they try to think of and do many things at once (i.e., reading music or improvising, handling the technical aspects of their instrument, listening, making musical-aesthetic decisions, following a conductor or ensemble partner).
Daniel Kahneman's 1973 capacity model of attention is often cited in psychology textbooks. It assumes that there is a limit to a person's ability to do mental work, but that we do have some control over how we allocate this mental capacity. We know that humans can and do carry on multiple tasks. Witness the driver of an automobile carrying on a conversation on a cell phone while simultaneously reading a map, and drinking coffee. We also know that our ability to do multiple tasks successfully depends on the complexity of each task. If traffic gets heavy or if it begins to rain hard or if we spill the coffee, the task of driving becomes more difficult and our comfort with multiple tasks lessens (or we have an accident). We also know that the amount of attention we have can vary from moment to moment. If we are tired, for example, it is much more difficult to concentrate on driving, much less attend to another activity. We also know that things outside ourselves can impact our attention. A near accident has a way of suddenly increasing our attention. An interesting conversation or a book-on-tape can keep us alert when the monotony of driving might otherwise cause drowsiness.
Music teachers are well aware of the limits of attention and the challenge of dividing this limited mental capacity among many complex tasks. Kahneman's capacity model of attention offers insights into the reasons for these limits. I will describe the model below in relation to the challenges of piano performance.
Momentary Intentions/Enduring Dispositions
Monitoring Activities and Responses
The Kahneman model is a useful tool for diagnosing problems of attention and addressing the high demands which musical performance places on our cognitive system, although it is not the only model which cognitive psychologists have proposed. Another model of attention attributes interference to incompatible activities rather than insufficient capacity. If the same mechanism is needed to carry out two or more activities, a bottleneck may occur when those two things happen simultaneously. For example, we have difficulty listening to two conversations simultaneously and so we either block out one or shift our attention from one conversation to the other. The bottleneck (or filter) theories have been very influential in explaining sensory processing, but seem less relevant to complex musical processing. For while it is obvious that our attention is limited, it is also obvious that we can and do attend to many things simultaneously in musical performance.
The Kahneman model for attention illustrates the ways in which an individual can gain control or at least influence the attentional processes. It also helps to explain how the system can fail. Arousal can be reasonable, capacity high, and allocation of resources sensible; however, if the activities demanded of the system exceed the limits of attention for that individual, the performance will suffer. Learning to maximize attentional capacity and to allocate this attention efficiently is an important aspect of musical study. This model provides a common-sense way of thinking about how to structure practice to achieve the greatest result with the least frustration. Performance problems are usually problems in thinking. By putting the spotlight on how/what we are thinking when doing a particular task, we are more likely to identify potential problems and find solutions.
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