Hack37.Grab Attention
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Hack 37. Grab Attention
Sudden movement or light can grab your attention, thanks to a second region for visual processing. What are you paying attention to? These words? In a minute it could switch to a friend or to making coffee or to the person on the bus who just stood up and you noticed out of the corner of your eye. We don't pay attention to everything we see or experience. Following two conversations at the same time is hard, even though we hear both perfectly well, and, likewise, it's simply not possible to read every word on the page of a book simultaneously, although they're all in plain view. While your senses work overtime to provide as much input as possible, there's a bottleneck in the brain's limited capacity for attention. So we consciously decide which line of text to focus on and read across and down the page, line by line. And this happens at the expense of all the other stimuli we could have attended to, such as the color of the walls or the traffic noise from the road outside. Choosing what to give attention to is voluntary...mostly. But attention can also be captured. 3.5.1. In ActionStand so that you're facing a crowded scene. Watching a crowded theater settle down is ideal. A busy street corner is a good choice, too. A TV screen or video game will do as well, as long as there's a lot going on in the frame. Don't try to direct your attention; just let it wander and feast your eyes on the full field of view. Notice that when a person waves, or stands up, your attention is grabbed and snaps to focus on the person's position. It's not so much that you notice the waving or standing up itself; the event simply captures your attention and you properly focus on that place a fraction of a second afterward. Since you're relaxed, your attention soon drifts away, until someone else moves and captures it again. Your attention scintillates across your whole field of view, darting from point to point. 3.5.2. How It WorksAfter visual information leaves the eye, it doesn't just go to one place for processing; the signal divides. Our conscious appreciation of visual information is provided by processing done in the visual cortex. It sits at the back of the brain in the area called the occipital lobe and performs what we typically associate with the job of vision: figuring out exactly what shape the thing you're looking at is, what color, if it's moving, then in what direction and how fast, what it means, and so onproviding the raw information needed to put names to faces and avoid stepping in front of a car while crossing a road. Attention capture, on the other hand, relies on processing done by a region of the brain called the superior colliculus. It gets a copy of the same visual information the visual cortex does from the retina, but processes it in a different way. This region is evolutionarily ancient, which means the basic structure was established and refined in brains far simpler than our own, through many species of animals. (Rather than relegating it to second place, fish and amphibians do most of their visual processing with their equivalent of the superior colliculus, called the optic lobe.) So as one might expect, it's not particularly sophisticated, compared to the visual cortex. And it doesn't use much of the information it receives; the superior colliculus looks at a black-and-white world through frosted glass. Then again, it doesn't need much. This processing is for rapid response, when it appears something potentially dangerous is happening and urgent action is needed quicker than the complex visual cortex can respond. It's just useful enough to guide reflex movements, tell the head and body to orient in a particular direction, and force attention to snap to important-seeming events.
That's what's going on when attention is captured. There's a sudden movement and the rapid response bit of your brain says, "Hey, I don't know what that was, but pay it some attention and figure out what to do in case it attacks us." Looking at the crowd, your attention darts around automatically because this bit of your brain feels startled enough to interrupt consciousness every time somebody waves suddenly. When you're sitting in a darkened theater, absorbed in the dialog on stage, think about what happens when a door opens at the side of the room. The sudden appearance of light grabs your attention. If it happens again, despite the fact that you know you're not interested, it still grabs your attention and demands a response. It's distracting. That's the automatic nature of attention capture coming into play. On the upside, that bright light flashing in the corner of your eye could well be a ray of sunlight being revealed as a large dangerous something lumbering out of the shadows toward you. The automatic capture of attention serves to orient conscious perception in important directions.
Events that capture attention include the two already mentioned: sudden light (actually, a sudden change in contrast) and sudden movement. In keeping with the purpose of facilitating rapid response, it's only new movement that captures attention. Ongoing motion, like a moving car or a walking person, doesn't trigger the automatic shift in attention. Two other triggers provide hints as to what else our brains regard as so critical to survival that they deserve a rapid response. One is an object appearing abruptly. In general, our brains give special treatment to objectsas opposed to backgrounds and shadows, which are given less attention. This makes sense, as objects such as other people, animals or food usually require a response of some kind. There are even dedicated routines to object tracking [Hack #36] . An extra person, rock, or car in the sceneespecially if it appears suddenlyis likely to be a big deal, so attentional capture is triggered.1 John Eastwood and his colleagues also suggest another trigger that is worth mentioning as it shows just how deep our social nature goes. The trigger here is facial expression.2 Eastwood's team made simple line-drawing faces, happy and sad ones, and asked people to count certain of the lines that made up the drawings. When the drawings were upside-down, so they were unrecognizable as faces, people did the counting exercise easily. But when the drawings were the right way up, counting took longer for drawings of faces that displayed negative emotions rather than for drawings of positive expressions. Why? The team's conclusion is that negative expressionssad or angry facesdistract you, in just the same way as light through a theater door grabs your attention away from the main action. 3.5.3. End Notes
3.5.4. See Also
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Pages: 159