Infrastructure pressure is widely attributed to the mobile phone, telling us that it drowns us in information and steals our attention. However, what is more personal is what our smartphones and the technology companies employ, demonstrates a new study by the University of Copenhagen.
Everyone seems to remember that we live in an attention economy where Google, Apple and Facebook offer us an unmanageable number of irresistible things.
In a series of controlled experiments that have just been published in the article “Testing Biassed Competition Between Attention Shifts,” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, the above discussed works done by the researchers reveal what makes people focus on a particular action when many choices are provided.
The options in the experiments were depicted with boxes on a computer monitor, each capable of containing between one and nine points. With regards to functionality, each box was linked to a corner of the screen in which a random letter was typed. The task was then to report one of the letters and to, in doing so, gain the points indicated by the box.
In this case, the process had to be carried out thousands of times by every participant, thereby ruling out the possibility of mere coincidence, said Thor Grünbaum, associate professor who leads the Cognition, Intention and Action study group alongside Søren Kylllingsbæk.
Our experiments revealed that several attention shifts are prepared simultaneously by the participants. This is to mean that in the course of activities, several attention shifts occur and vie for a performance. If we link the various shifts to various incentives, then it will be easy to prove that the shift that is most likely to garner the highest incentive always comes out tops.
If, for instance, I have now decided to buy flour on my way from work then, the action has to be stored in the long term memory. As Grünbaum has described, especially when we have planned several different actions, which we usually do.
Grünbaum and Kyllingsbæk assume that here again we pay much attention to the action in which we find the highest value.
From this it can be expected that my plan to buy flour will be initiated if I notice a supermarket sign when coming from work. These issues are still under testing hence we are creating necessary experimental designs on factors that lead to the selection between competing plans.
Reference: University of Copenhagen. Study finds our attention shifts influenced by rewards, not habits.
