In my last post, I wrote about the Monkey Business Illusion.
Picking up from where I left off - what do we really learn from this type of research? I recently stumbled upon two interesting discussions on LinkedIn, related to retention and memory. Participants in the discussion shared several links to some very useful research that provided the connecting dots.
I’ve abstracted a short gist from Smith and Kosslyn’s Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain (2007): Chapter 3: Attention
“In the context of human information processing, attention is the process that, at a given moment, enhances some information and inhibits other information. The enhancement enables us to select some information for further processing, and the inhibition enables us to set some information aside.”
These instances of perceptual blindness are known as “failures of selection in space and time”. As we are assaulted by an almost constant stream of information, a continuous sifting or filtering process selects information that is likely to be meaningful over information that is perceived to be irrelevant. It is this selective attention that helps us make a coherent picture of the world by averting an information overload. One aspect of this is change blindness (or change deafness) or the failure to detect changes in the physical aspects of a scene.
The Invisible Gorilla is one among many experiments that provide evidence that attention is necessary for effective encoding. Encoding is the process by which “information is transformed into a memory representation”.
When we concentrate on one source of input, we are paying focused attention to relevant information and excluding all other irrelevant data. When we are focused on counting the number of passes of the ball, we simply do not take in any information about the gorilla.
One of the reasons for poor encoding is divided attention. There are other factors that influence the quality of encoding. Encoding is influenced not just by how much we pay attention to information. The quality of encoding also depends on the extent to which we elaborate or try to make sense of that information or connect it to other information. Conscious retrieval and practice, especially practice that is spaced out in time also help encoding (as opposed to being presented with information).
Reference:
Smith and Kosslyn (2007): Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain, Pearson
