The SELECT training module within the NeuroMite program trains selective attention – the ability to respond quickly to relevant stimuli and to suppress inappropriate responses.
Scene and Task
Imagine your traveling through a tunnel in a mine car. Relevant and irrelevant stimuli (optical, acoustic or crossmodal) suddenly emerge from the darkness. Your task is to respond only to relevant stimuli. If you respond late to a relevant stimulus or fails to respond at all, negative feedback is given in the form of a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning. If your response is in error to an irrelevant stimulus, the figure or the sound source is illuminated in red.
Theory
An attention selectivity training program should help the client to distinguish rapidly between relevant and irrelevant aspects of a task. Most selective attention tasks require a quick decision within a set of stimuli in which the relevant and irrelevant items are clearly defined.
Training Forms
The SELECT training module consists of three training forms.
• The S1 training form trains selective attention in the visual modality (figures appear in the tunnel).
• S2 is the acoustic training form, in which the student’s task is to respond to relevant sounds.
• In the S3 training form, the student is instructed to respond to specific stimulus combinations (figures that make particular noises).
Difficulty Structure
There are 15 difficulty levels for each training form. SELECT adapts to the student’s ability level in two ways. Firstly, the number of relevant or irrelevant stimuli increases or decreases. Secondly, at each difficulty level, the maximum permitted reaction time adapts to the speed of the student’s reactions. Thus for a skilled student, the wagon gets faster after the first few responses. This ensures that from the outset, the training module is optimally adapted to the student’s skill level and is never either too easy or too difficult for them.