Imagine you are driving to a meeting. It’s a long drive and you don’t want to miss your exit off the freeway. But while you are driving, your mind begins to wander off to other things, like the argument you had with your spouse yesterday, or the Hawaiian vacation you are planning for next winter. And then after a while you notice that you past your exit over a ten minutes ago! Does this mean there is something wrong with you? Are you starting to lose your mind? The answer is no. As Zanesco and colleagues confirmed in a meta-analysis of 68 studies of mind wandering during task performance, it just means you are like everyone else!
Continue reading “Does Your Mind Wander When You Should Be Paying Attention? Join the Club!”Category: Attention and Perception
Do Emotions Make It Harder to Think and Act Logically?
In the classic television show “Star Trek”, the Vulcan character Mr. Spock was able to think and act more logically than his human shipmates because he did not experience emotions. The implication of course is that human emotions somehow interfere with thinking logically. But is this true?
There have been many experiments designed to find out whether emotions interfere with something called “cognitive control”, which is the ability to ignore irrelevant information that would otherwise interfere with performing an important cognitive task. Results from these experiments have been confusing, so Zhang and colleagues decided to see if a meta-analysis of 71 of these studies would clear things up. Their results show that the kinds of emotions that can be studied in a laboratory setting don’t interfere much with cognitive control and may, under the right circumstances, even help. So perhaps Vulcans don’t have such a big advantage over us emotional humans after all.
Continue reading “Do Emotions Make It Harder to Think and Act Logically?”It’s Right in Front of You!
You open the refrigerator looking for the ketchup but you don’t see it. You ask your spouse “Where did you put the ketchup?” They look and say “It’s right there in front of you!” And then, surprised, suddenly you see it. You have just experienced inattentional blindness (IB).
Inattentional Blindness happens to most of us everyday. It may manifest as “refrigerator blindness” or “pantry blindness” or, more seriously, “pedestrian blindness” while driving. But what causes IB? There are two main theories: Attention Set and Load Theory (Attention Capacity). Attention Set predicts IB will occur when a person is looking for one thing and doesn’t see something else, which doesn’t seem to fit the “refrigerator blindness” example but could explain “pedestrian blindness”. Load Theory, on the other hand, predicts IB will occur when attention capacity is somehow overloaded, which could explain both refrigerator and pedestrian blindness. Hutchinson and colleagues set out to discover whether data from 81 different studies testing one or both of the theories could help determine which theory did a better job overall of explaining IB. Their conclusion: both theories do a pretty good job of explaining Inattentional Blindness but do so under different circumstances.
Continue reading “It’s Right in Front of You!”We Look to See What Others Are Looking At
We humans are social creatures. We form our world views, our understanding of reality, based on information and cues we receive from others in our social groups, especially our families and closest circles of friends. How does this alignment of world views happen? Probably in lots of little ways, and probably gradually rather than all at once.
In this study reported by McKay and colleagues, the researchers showed that something as basic as where we look is influenced by where others are looking. Moreover, their meta-analysis of data from 4,239 participants showed that people were most likely to look where others were looking when they first made direct eye-to-eye contact with each other.
Continue reading “We Look to See What Others Are Looking At”Why Is It Hard To Do Two Things At Once?
Divided attention can be deadly, as we know from warnings not to text or talk while driving. But why exactly is it sometimes difficult to divide our attention between two tasks like driving and talking? Back in the 1980’s, psychologists were testing and debating several competing theories to explain the costs of doing two things at once. Chris Wickens and I wondered if perhaps some of these different theories were not really competing after all but were rather complementary, each tapping into different ways that simultaneous tasks might interfere with each other. Could we design an experiment that would help us find out?
We realized that a dual-axis tracking task could provide us with the opportunity to test the distinctive contributions of different sources of difficulty in divided attention. Dual-axis tracking, after all, could be configured in different ways such that, on one hand, subjects were literally performing two separate one-dimensional tracking tasks simultaneously or, on the other hand, performing a single tracking task in two dimensions. We knew that control system engineers had devised mathematically sophisticated ways of measuring tracking performance that might reveal more precisely what the sources of interference in dual-axis tracking could be. So we designed an experiment in which we measured how well participants performed dual-axis tracking tasks under a variety of different configurations, and then we looked at what our results meant for the different competing or complementary theories in play.
Continue reading “Why Is It Hard To Do Two Things At Once?”
Dr Martin Fracker 