Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The concept of ‘attention’ – our ability to focus on particularparts of the world - is a seemingly simple one. Research,however, often driven by clinicians need to diagnoseattentional deficits after brain injuries, has demonstrated itscomplexity. This has resulted in significant testing beingrequired to assess the full range of attentional abilities.Herein, we designed a Subjective Attention Scale, consistingof 15 Likert-scale questions based on five types of attentionidentified by Sohlberg and Mateer (1989). Preliminary datasuggested the scale had good psychometric properties(Cronback’s α > 0.8) and an interpretable factor structure (4factors; 49% of variance). However, it showed almost nosignificant correlations with measures from six laboratorytests of attention. Instead, analyses suggest peoples’subjective beliefs regarding their attentional abilities mapmore closely onto the Conscientiousness personality trait thanthose traits identified from clinical work.