The phrase "altering attention" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts where one is discussing the act of changing or shifting focus or concentration.
Example: "The study focused on altering attention to improve cognitive performance in participants."
Alternatives: "shifting focus" or "changing concentration".
These results suggested that catastrophizing influences pain perception by altering attention and anticipation, and by heightening emotional responses to pain [ 43].
Specifically, it highlights that when a task achieves its goal of successfully altering attention, it will reliably produce emotional change, and when it doesn't, it won't.
These findings suggest that pain catastrophizing exerts influence on pain processing that is independent of the influence of depression and supports the hypothesis that catastrophizing influences pain perception through altering attention and anticipation, and heightening emotional responses to pain.
We demonstrated a relation among childhood maltreatment and altered attention to sad faces in clinical depression.
However, selecting between closer versus distant number pairs is equivalent in the need to alter attention or response strategies (i.e., cognitive flexibility).
These findings raise the possibility of modulating D1 receptor activity to alter attention and/or working memory and thereby ameliorate neglect in stroke patients.
Most convincingly, a number of recent studies have used a cognitive training paradigm to alter attention to emotional stimuli and have been able to demonstrate experimentally that inducing a negative attentional bias in healthy participants increases anxiety (4), while reducing negative attentional biases in clinically anxious populations improves anxiety (5,6).
I'll stop altering your attention in a moment – but I want to leave you with a scene from Tristes Tropiques.
It seems that despite clear evidence that altering biased attention for threat can reduce emotional vulnerability, and encouraging results with clinical samples, the failure of a number of studies to modify selective attention should be grounds for all researchers to cease investigations into the clinical applications of attentional bias modification using the internet.
Perception and pain thresholds were not significantly altered whereas attention was significantly lower under MST®.
