Inability to maintain attention. The person shifts from one area or topic to another with minimal provocation. Distractibility may be a manifestation of an underlying medical disease, medication side effect, or a mental disorder such as an anxiety disorder, mania, or schizophrenia.
The tendency to be easily drawn away from any task at hand and to focus on extraneous stimuli of the moment.
Distractibility refers to difficulties in sustaining attention to tasks, concentrating, tracking, and screening out interfering distractions. A child who is distractible may appear to be daydreaming, doodling, or paying unnecessary attention to what others are doing (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorders [CHADD], 2000). Children described as distractible typically display shorter attention spans than do their same-age peers, and they usually have difficulty completing assignments when multitasking is involved. Their inability to focus attention may result in uncompleted assignments and forgotten items. Distractibility negatively impacts a child’s ability successfully to complete school and household tasks.
Inability to focus for very long on any single task, tending to shift attention to new sights, sounds, or activities in the environment; a common problem among children with learning disabilities, especially attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Inability to focus one’s attention; loss of the ability to concentrate.