WASTE TIME LOOKING FOR YOUR KEYS? TRY THIS ATTENTION TRICK
New research shows that current communications with their environment can guide where individuals appearance.
"WE CAN'T FULLY PROCESS EVERYTHING IN A SCENE, SO WE HAVE TO PICK AND CHOOSE THE PARTS OF THE SCENE WE WANT TO PROCESS MORE FULLY…"
For instance, do you lose time in the early morning looking for your keys? You might have more good luck finding them quickly by writing words "KEYS" on a light switch you use every early morning, the research suggests.
Our aesthetic globe is cluttered, complex, and confusing. "We can't fully process everything in a scene, so we need to pick and choose the components of the scene we want to process more fully," says Richard Abrams, teacher of psychological and mind sciences at Washington College in St. Louis. "That's what we call ‘attention.'"
So after that, how do we choose which components of a scene deserve our attention?
"We're more most likely to direct our focus on points that suit objects that we've communicated with," Abrams says. The new research shows that this holds true also if they just suit in meaning—not look, he explains.
Previous research has revealed that our attention is biased towards objects that share basic features—such as color—with something we have recently seen.
For instance, finding your keys on a red key chain would certainly be easier if you had formerly reached for a red apple, compared with if you had chosen a yellow banana for your treat. This effect is called "priming." This priming also occurs for items that are just conceptually related—the word "KEYS" does not appear like your keys, yet the facilitation still occurs.
And if we want to enhance that predisposition? Perform an activity while being keyed with a picture or, inning accordance with the most recent research, with a word, and you will find your keys also much faster.
"Points we act upon are, by meaning, ‘important' because we've decided to make an activity," Abrams says. Production an activity may produce a indicate in the mind that what you are seeing is more crucial compared to if you simply observed it, passively.In the study, which shows up in the journal Psychonomic Publication and Review, individuals performed a set of ostensibly unrelated jobs.
