Factors of attention

The importance of the role of attention is widely recognized not only by psychologists but also among academics and managers involved in knowledge management. It has become the bottleneck of the performance of white-collar workers. The previous studies of attention in the field of knowledge management primarily concerned with getting the attention of the individuals and/or groups. However, for the process of knowledge increase it is also important that we are able to pay attention – and there is no white-collar work without knowledge increase. There are many factors influencing our attention. This paper examines the factors along the dimensions of cognition and motivation only; the environmental impacts (like noise) are not investigated. The role of love and the muse – the emotional involvement – is discussed in detail. The result of the paper is a descriptive model of attention, which is then simulated with Doctus knowledge-based system. The model presented here (both, the descriptive and the simulative ones) is offered to discussion aiming to gain expert validation and fine-tuning.