How many things can we attend to simultaneously? Imagine being an air traffic controller and you are monitoring O’Hare arrivals on the day before Thanksgiving. How many aircraft can you attend to simultaneously? Or imagine watching a flock of grazing impalas in Krueger National Park or the Serengeti while a pride of lions is casually […]
Visual Search
Better get those headphones: We can’t really ignore task-related noise Like many people, I work in an open office. Workers increasingly find themselves in open offices as companies (and universities) switch to these layouts in a bid to maximize space and reduce building costs. In my case, I work remotely but share a local co-working […]
Attention guides human perception, memory, and action in intriguing ways. Some time ago on this blog we learned that visual search can be directed by conceptual information: Saying or reading a word such as “tomato” makes it easier to find red things. We also learned on this blog that looking at a tomato can help you touch […]
You are looking at a display of 17 green blobs and one red blob. Your task is to find the red blob and press a key as soon as you have found it. What could be simpler than this visual search task? Its apparent simplicity notwithstanding, this task has opened a fascinating and sometimes complex window […]
Imagine the following dystopian job: You are working in a factory, and your task is to look for that matching sock so the pair can be packaged together. To make things worse, you are given another sock every few seconds, together with a new drawer in which to look for its twin. To manage the […]