SELECT

Scene and Task

The client travels through a tunnel in a mine car. Relevant and irrelevant stimuli (optical, acoustic or crossmodal) suddenly emerge from the darkness. The client’s task is to respond only to relevant stimuli. If he responds 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 the client responds 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 program 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 client’s task is to respond to relevant sounds.
• In the S3 training form the client is instructed to respond to specific stimulus combinations (figures that make particular noises).

Difficulty

There are 15 difficulty levels for each training form. SELECT adapts to the client’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 client’s reactions. Thus for a skilled client the wagon gets faster after the first few responses. This ensures that from the outset the training program is optimally adapted to the client’s skill and is never either too easy or too difficult for him.