As the researchers note, the importance of paying attention at important times has become more important in our modern society—lapses can lead to car accidents or looking silly in a business meeting. They, like many others, wanted to know if a way could be found to cause people to be better at paying attention. To find out they enlisted the assistance of several volunteers who agreed to lay down inside of an fMRI machine while they played what amounted to a simple video game.
The idea was relatively straight forward, ask the volunteers to look at images of landscapes with people's faces superimposed over them and to press a button when the face shown was female (which was most of the time) and then to press a button depending on whether the landscape scene was inside or outside. Very easy and very boring, which was the point, they wanted the volunteers to zone out. As the volunteers did as they were asked, their brains were scanned by the fMRI with the images sent to a computer running pattern recognition software that was able to detect if they were looking at a male or female face or an indoor or outdoor scene, which meant is could tell when the person was spacing out.
The next part involved training the mind—when the software detected mind wandering, it automatically made very subtle changes to what the volunteers were seeing, making the background landscape grow dimmer for example, to highlight the face on top of it. By doing so, the researchers were able to cause an improvement in focus (as compared to a control group which did not get any brain feedback adjustments to their screen) by the volunteers as evidenced by the scores they received while playing their video game. That showed, the researchers claimed, that they were able to exercise the brain in a way that caused an improved ability to pay attention.
The findings by the team may or may not relate to real world situations, but the team is confident that they have found that providing feedback from a person's own brain can help improve concentration abilities.
