How Good Is Your Attentional Control?
Keeping your focus where you put it, and moving it when you need to
Attentional control is the steering wheel behind attention itself: not how much you notice, but how much say you have over where your mind goes next. Two skills make it up - holding your focus against distraction, and deliberately shifting it when the task changes - and they turn out to be only loosely related, so a strong grip on one says little about the other. The scale that measures it is a questionnaire, which raises an obvious question: do people who say they control their attention well actually do so when tested? The research on that question is more interesting than either a simple yes or no.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your everyday attention, not about your best moment of focus ever.
What it measures
The two published factors of the Attentional Control Scale - focusing, your ability to resist distraction and stay on what matters, and shifting, your ability to move attention between tasks or ideas on purpose - plus a related third score on how much pressure or anxiety disrupts that control, which is where the scale's original research began. This is not attention-deficit disorder, which is a clinical diagnosis about a different kind of difficulty; it is also not our mind-wandering test, which is about whether your thoughts drift off task, or our absent-mindedness test, which counts actual everyday slips. This one is about how much choice you have over where your attention goes.
Based on: Attentional Control Scale (Derryberry & Reed, 2002)
Possible results
Focusing
Resisting distraction and staying on what matters.
Shifting
Moving your attention between tasks or ideas on purpose.
Under pressure
Whether anxiety or strong emotion disrupts your attentional control.
Common questions
Is this the same as ADHD?
No. This scale measures a normal-range trait in the general population, not a clinical diagnosis, which requires a professional assessment against specific criteria. A low score here just means attention control is an effort for you; it is not, by itself, evidence of any disorder.
Why might my self-rating not match how I would do on a real attention test?
Because they are measuring related but different things. Studies comparing this questionnaire to behavioural tasks found that only the focusing side lined up well with lab performance, while the shifting side and the felt experience of control diverged more. People are also not perfectly placed to judge their own cognition, especially under conditions - like anxiety - that change from moment to moment.
How is this different from your mind-wandering test?
Mind-wandering asks whether your thoughts leave the task, deliberately or not, and how quickly you notice. Attentional control asks something upstream of that: how much say you have over where your attention goes in the first place. You could have excellent control and still choose, on purpose, to let your mind wander - that would show up as high control and high deliberate wandering at once.
Can attentional control be trained?
There is genuine debate about how much, and dedicated brain-training programmes have a mixed record of transferring to real life. What reliably helps is more mundane: removing competing demands from your environment, working in blocks with a clear single target, and treating anxious moments separately, since that is when control is hardest to hold onto.
Sources
- Derryberry, D., & Reed, M. A. (2002). Anxiety-related attentional biases and their regulation by attentional control. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. doi:10.1037/0021-843x.111.2.225
- Judah, M. R., Grant, D. M., Mills, A. C., & Lechner, W. V. (2014). Factor structure and validation of the Attentional Control Scale. Cognition and Emotion. doi:10.1080/02699931.2013.835254
- Reinholdt-Dunne, M. L., Mogg, K., & Bradley, B. P. (2013). Attention control: Relationships between self-report and behavioural measures, and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Cognition & Emotion. doi:10.1080/02699931.2012.715081
An honest note This adapts the Attentional Control Scale; the wording is Quinthea's own, so scores are not comparable to published norms. Worth knowing: this is a self-report measure, and research comparing it to behavioural attention tasks found only partial overlap - the two approaches capture related but separable things, so how you feel about your control is not identical to how you perform under test conditions. This is not attention-deficit disorder, which is a separate clinical diagnosis, and difficulty here is common and not, on its own, a disorder.
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