Attention is a powerful filter. Sometimes too powerful.

There’s a very interesting post up at Psyblog about the cocktail party effect, the remarkable ability we humans have to tune into just one thread of input among many others — and tune OUT all the rest.

The most famous demonstration of this probably “did you see the moonwalking bear?” (watch it if you haven’t) — but as Psyblog points out, we probably miss much more important things all the time, while we’re paying attention to something else. The researcher who first demonstrated this effect, Colin Cherry, did it by playing two different messages simultaneously, one through each side of a pair of headphones. People had no difficulty following the stream they were asked to pay attention to, but:

Cherry found his participants picked up surprisingly little information presented to the other, ‘rejected ear’, often failing to notice blatant changes to the unattended message. When asked afterwards, participants:

• could not identify a single phrase from the speech presented to the rejected ear.
• weren’t sure the language in the rejected ear was even English.
• failed to notice when it changed to German.
• mostly didn’t notice when the speech to the rejected ear was being played backwards (though some did report that it sounded a bit strange).

The Somebody Else’s Problem Field is another example of the same phenomonen. (I know there are several very strong SEP fields active in my house right now, rendering various things that sort-of need to be done effectively invisible — what about yours?)

The interesting question, of course, is what this means for the vaunted Attention Economy. Why are we tuned into the streams we are, and what might we be missing? PsyBlog promises a series on attention, which I will pay attention to.

Tagged as: attention economy, Social media, twitter