How Attention Works

Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction

Stefan Van der Stigchel (University of Utrecht), Danny Guinan

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English

Massachusetts Inst of Tec
12 March 2019

Psychology; Neurosciences

Series: The MIT Press

How we filter out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we need to know.

We are surrounded by a world rich with visual information, but we pay attention to very little of it, filtering out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we think we need to know. Advertisers, web designers, and other ""attention architects"" try hard to get our attention, promoting products with videos on huge outdoor screens, adding flashing banners to websites, and developing computer programs with blinking icons that tempt us to click. Often they succeed in distracting us from what we are supposed to be doing. In How Attention Works, Stefan Van der Stigchel explains the process of attention and what the implications are for our everyday lives.

The visual attention system is efficient, Van der Stigchel writes, because it doesn't waste energy processing every scrap of visual data it receives; it gathers only relevant information. We focus on one snippet of information and assume that everything else is stable and consistent with past experience; that's why most people miss even the most glaring continuity errors in films. If an object doesn't meet our expectations, chances are we won't see it. Van der Stigchel makes his case with examples from real life, explaining, among other things, the limitations of color perception (and why fire trucks shouldn't be red); the importance of location (security guards and radiologists, for example, have to know where to look); the attention-getting properties of faces and spiders; what we can learn from someone else's eye movements; why we see what we expect to see (magicians take advantage of this); and visual neglect and unattended information.

By: Stefan Van der Stigchel (University of Utrecht)
Translated by: Danny Guinan
Imprint: Massachusetts Inst of Tec
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 17mm
ISBN: 9780262039260
ISBN 10: 0262039265
Series: The MIT Press
Pages: 152
Publication Date: 12 March 2019
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

tefan Van der Stigchel is Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Utrecht University.