Chris Atherton at TCUK09

Visual attention: a psychologist’s perspective

Dr Chris Atherton

School of Psychology,University of Central Lancashire

your brain is lazy, shallow, and easily

distracted.

(but ultimately, also hackable)

So what do you do?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephangeyer/3020487807/sizes/o/

“so are you analysing me now, then?”

thinkingperception

attention

memory

University of Central Lancashire

Preston

Andy

Where is the educational merit ...

• ... in row after row of bullet points?

• Students are expected to sit there for two hours

• I get antsy if I don’t check Twitter for 10 minutes

education as endurance event

http://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/1800877044/

education needs to embrace

instructional design!

disclaimer: ‘education’

technical communication needs

to embrace psychology

modern psychology

http://www.gentlemansemporium.com/webimages/gallery_1850_gents.gif

Gestalt grouping principles

continuity

similarity

proximity

9-dot problem

1

2

3

4

start here

there is no square!

we group objects faster based on proximity ...

... than we do based on colour or shape

(Quinlan & Wilton, 1998)

for what/where decisions, the brain

hacks itself!

where?

what?

visualcortex

what/where pathways

farming out tasks to separate pathways buys more processing power

“attentionomics”

Experiment :

gloatsproutbringtheirbenchstocktrain

whole

blacktrapstrapslackcrackflap

wrapwrack

glacksprutslaffblupprib

kreebfrallsowl

the “magic number 7” (± 2)

(Miller, 1956)

magic number 4 ?

(Cowan, 2001)

subitization

subitization

subitization

max. working memory load:

4-5 things

working memory capacity is limited— but hackable.

cognitive load= amount of work

needed to understand or learn something

intrinsic cognitive load:how inherently difficult

something is

A

C

E

D

F

B

A

CB

extraneous cognitive load:extra work imposed by

the thinking/learning environment

A

CB

A has a reciprocal relationship with B and with C.

B has a reciprocal relationship with A but only receives incoming information from C

C has a reciprocal relationship with A but not with B, to which it feeds forward.

good instructional design is all about reducing

extraneous load

the hack: farm out work to the brain’s different pathways

visualcortex

visual/auditory pathways

auditorycortex

http://moviescreenshots.blogspot.com/

we LOVE audiovisual stimulation!

so why isn’t this any good?

does pictures

does language (spoken or written)

Death by PowerPoint:

boredoverloaded

... our research

http://identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

“why can’t education be like that?”

not just aesthetic!

study 1(in the lab)

traditional bullet-points with occasional diagrams

sparse text only

sparse text with diagrams

identical auditory track in each condition

MCQ performance

9. If an advertising campaign has 60 Gross Rating Points (GRPs), the advert could reach:

(a) 60% of the target audience once, or 15% of the audience four times

(b) 30% of the target audience once, or 15% of the audience two times

(c) 30% of the audience twice, and 40% of the audience four times

(d) 60% of the audience once, and 10% of the audience four times

traditional

sparse text

sparse text, graphics

... no difference between groups

Essay answer performance

What do you remember about the main part of the presentation? Please write as much as you can ...

How advertising can be useful to a product but that there is a fine line between successful and negative advertising. Identified key factors affecting the success of advertising, such as exposure and an adverts relation to the product.Frequency of exposure can have a detrimental effect on the success of an advert. Consumers should be made aware of a product but not bombarded. Advertisers must concern themselves with selecting suitable mediums to reach desired audiences at the right frequency of risk the advert not affecting the consumer

num

ber

of t

hem

es w

ritt

en a

bout

* = significant difference

In other words, slides that look like this:

help students learn better than slides that look like this:

study 2 (in the lecture theatre)

Again, students either saw slides like this ...

... or slides like this:

MCQ performance = same

Essay answer performance

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

no. o

f the

mes

wri

tten

abo

ut

traditionalslides

sparseslides

significant (p < .05)

(a) sparse slides lead to fewer competing attentional demands

either ...

(b) sparse visual cues lead to better encoding of information

or ...

implications for instructional design and tech comms?

max. working memory load:

4-5 things

less is more!

split the load

pictures

words

make the brain’s native skills work for you

your brain is lazy, shallow, and easily

distracted.

(but ultimately, also hackable)

finiteattentionspan.wordpress.com

Twitter: @finiteattention

Thank you to:Dr Andy MorleyOlivia Mitchell Simon Bostock

TCUK 2009 committee