Impact of Negative Air Ion Exposure on Attention

Processing of different stimuli or attention has widespread psychological consequences in one's life. Without attention, perceiving, thinking, learning, deciding and acting is not possible as it is the gateway to all these processes. But in this era of high workload, stress, competition and technological advances attention capacities are deteriorating a lot. Decline in attention can have far-reaching effects on one's ability to function adequately and efficiently in everyday life at work home and elsewhere. Thus, it is important to enhance attention. Various techniques are available for enhancing other cognitive processes such as memory, learning etc. but, the techniques for enhancing attention are yet not well established in the existing literature. Moreover, the techniques available for enhancing attention are very few and require a lot of training, time, effort and experience for implementing them. Negative air ion therapy could be one such technique that does not require much training, is easy and economical to handle the attention disorder and has been shown to exert a positive effect memory and learning. If this therapy can enhance memory and learning, it is quite possible that it can also affect attention and if it shows same impact on attention, it can have wide implications. Keeping this in mind, present work was designed to study the impact of Negative air ion exposure on Selective and Sustained attention. A two group pre post design was employed. A sample of 30 students (n=15) studying in class 8th and 9th in the age range of 14-16 years, with an average span of attention was selected. Experimental group was given an exposure of 1000-1200 ions/cm3 for 10 days and no exposure was given to control group. Subjects were tested on two simple tasks i.e. Selective and Sustained attention before and after the ionic exposure. The results revealed that negative air ion therapy enhances the Selective and Sustained attention of adolescents.