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Key points
- It can be hard to notice changes in our environment, even changes as obvious as a person’s identity.
- Attention is an important first step in forming a long-lasting memory, and a large role of attention involves keeping information out of mind.
- No one is able to do two tasks at once without one of the tasks suffering.
Wouldn’t it be terrific if using our brains every day could make us experts in the intricacies of attention, perception, and memory? Or if we could trust our instincts about how attention or memory work because of our lifelong experiences using these abilities?
Although it seems like we should be experts in these domains by virtue of our human experience, at most, we become experts in the select features of cognition that dominate our conscious awareness. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are all the operations that allow our brains to work efficiently—but these operations can violate many of our expectations about how our minds actually work.
In this next series of posts, we focus on the myriad of counterintuitive ways in which our minds work. We begin, in this post, by examining our assumptions about attention.
Imagine talking with a stranger. You turn your back for a moment. When you turn around, the person you were talking with is gone, replaced with a different person standing in their place. You’d notice, right?
We’re guessing you answered, “Yes, of course!” But in reality, the answer depends on a number of factors and sometimes will be a resounding “no.” Most critically, it depends on whether you are paying attention to the features that distinguish the people from one another.
If you happened to be looking at a person’s hat or noticed their height, and those features changed when your back was turned, then you’d notice the difference. But if you were focused on what the person was saying or on features that didn’t change (perhaps both individuals had a beard and were wearing a blue shirt), you may well have missed the switch. Do you find this hard to believe? Perhaps you want to watch this video, showcasing some of the work by psychologist Dan Simons, and see for yourself (Simons & Levin, 1997).
The phenomenon of change blindness emphasizes that it can be hard to notice changes in our environment, even changes as obvious as a person’s identity. This phenomenon arises because, at any given moment, we’re only able to attend to a small fraction of all the information in our environment. While we’ll notice changes in the details that we’re attending to, we’ll miss large changes in the details that didn’t make it through our attentional filter. You may think of attention as something that helps you to keep important information in mind, but in reality, a large role of attention is also keeping information out of mind. Although this may seem like a shortcoming of our attentional capacities, it is likely a necessary and adaptive function that prevents us from becoming overwhelmed by the amount of information around us at any given point in time.
Attention is an important first step in forming a long-lasting memory. If you don’t attend to certain features of the person you’re talking with, you won’t be able to notice that they’ve changed even in the brief time it takes to turn your back away from and then back toward the individual.
Need more convincing? Think of a person you know well. Now, try to bring to mind specific details about their appearance: What color is their hair? Eyes? Style of haircut? Color of their glasses? Are their ears pierced? You may be surprised to realize that although you have seen someone many times, if you haven’t paid any attention to these details, then these details haven’t made it into a long-lasting memory.
These attentional nuances are exacerbated by multitasking. In a digital age, where we text, respond to emails, and hold in-person conversations all at the same time, it is easy to believe that we are good at multitasking. But there’s even more information that’s filtered out—even more content that’s lost before we even realize its presence—when we’re multitasking. No one is able to do two tasks at once without one of the tasks suffering (Just, Keller, & Cynkar, 2008; Ralph, Thomson, Cheyne, & Smilek, 2014; Strayer, Watson, & Drews, 2011). No matter how good you think you are at multitasking, doing so requires the brain to do a more aggressive filtration than it otherwise would have done if you’d only been focused on a single task. We don’t intuit this negative consequence of multitasking, in large part because the details lost are those we can never miss because we never even noticed them in the first place.
So, there’s a lot of information in our world that we don’t pay attention to, and because it’s filtered out of our mind so rapidly, we don’t even realize its absence. This happens even when there’s only a single task we’re focused on, like talking to a stranger on the street, and it is amplified during our attempts to multitask. This may be helpful to keep this in mind during busier times in our lives.
References
Just, M. A., Keller, T. A., & Cynkar, J. (2008). A decrease in brain activation associated with driving when listening to someone speak. Brain research, 1205, 70-80.
Ralph, B. C., Thomson, D. R., Cheyne, J. A., & Smilek, D. (2014). Media multitasking and failures of attention in everyday life. Psychological research, 78(5), 661-669.
Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1997). Change blindness. Trends in cognitive sciences, 1(7), 261-267.
Strayer, D. L., Watson, J. M., & Drews, F. A. (2011). Cognitive distraction while multitasking in the automobile. In Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 54, pp. 29-58). Academic Press.
