I once asked Anne Treisman, my Ph.D. supervisor, how and when I could get my Ph.D. Anne told me that I will get it once I learn all the good things from her and establish something of my own. This meant that I must learn everything about focused attention then find something new. Considering the […]
Attention
One needs to look no further than the rich set of articles in this special issue to know that Feature Integration Theory (FIT) continues to be one of the most influential sets of ideas in cognitive psychology. From research on multi-sensory integration to depression, the seeds of Anne Treisman’s theory have spread far and wide. […]
My decades-long involvement with Anne Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory (FIT) must have begun in 1986. I was a junior faculty member at MIT at the time, working on visual aftereffects and binocular vision. I didn’t know much about attention. One might say that I had not paid attention to attention. Then, in 1986, Anne published an […]
Imagine that you’re in the center of a busy city watching a pedestrian traffic signal for your cue to walk. The green walking man gives the go-ahead and you start walking, a police car siren sounds and its emergency vehicle lighting flashes, capturing your attention, and sending you back to the sidewalk as the police […]
We rarely listen to just one stream of information at a time. Whether we are at a dinner party, on a crowded bus, or talking on the phone while walking down a busy street, more often than not there are multiple voices that compete for our attention. People are generally very good at focusing on […]
Certain songs have a way of getting into your head and staying there for a while. We’ve covered the cognitive side of earworms before. These songs that haunt us tend to have a recognizable tempo or beat—usually one that we can move to. Lady Gaga has given us a number of earworms, including Poker Face, […]
As we go about our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to new information―news reports from a foreign country, politicians’ statements about domestic policy, a friend’s description of a new restaurant, and celebrity gossip. Some of that information is true and some is false. How do we remember which statements are true and which are […]
Noise can be annoying. It is also by far the most common preventable cause of hearing impairment. Unsurprisingly, noise levels in the workplace are therefore subject to occupational health regulations. Workers must wear headphones to protect themselves against noise from chainsaws, jet engines, or any other loud device. No such standards exist for recreational noise, […]
Clutter is a fact of life. Wherever you look, there is clutter. Even the tidiest of tidy rooms will contain much visual clutter: some objects will be in front of others, thereby partially obscuring them. So if you need to reach for the cup that’s behind the toaster, then your visual system must work through […]
People often do multiple things at the same time. We can talk on the phone while stacking the dishwasher, and some university students seemingly know how to type messages on their cell phones while listening to a lecture. There are many occasions, however, when such multi-tasking breaks down or becomes dangerous. For example, notwithstanding how […]