Attention

Attention is what allows us to selectively process some things and not others. Red color is a classic example of guiding gamers’ attention which tends to be overused.

Stroop effect (cognitive interference)

Stroop effect is a delay in the reaction time of a task occurs due to a mismatch in stimuli. In games term, showing green vignette effect when player character gets hurt will create stroop effect because most of the time, the color that represents hurt or damage is red.

We cannot process all information in the environment

Focused auditory attention

However, we can put most of our attention on listening to one thing, for example, chatting with a friend in a noisy room.

This is also shown in dichotic listening and shadowing task where we are able to repeat what was heard in only one ear while the having different message in another ear.

Lavie’s Model

• As perception load increases, perceptual distraction decreases
  • When we try to focus on something such as tv, we will ‘zone out’ which the perceived objects other than the tv will be reduced to minimal
• As cognitive load increases, perceptual distraction increases
  • When we are trying hard to think of something, we may close our eyes to do so in order to decrease the distraction

Pop-Out Effect

When the target and the distracters share no common features especially when the background is also dissimilar to the target

For example: spotting a red dot on a white paper with fews black squares. Red dot will be easily get spotted as it ‘pops out’.

Conjoint Search

When target and distracters share some features.

With the same example, but in this case, add in different colors dot and squares. The pop out effect is reduced.

Attentional Spotlight

Posner (1980) stated that we focus on a particular spatial location to enhance our processing stimuli over the entire perceived visual world. That means when we’re searching for Wally (a puzzle picture to spot a character), our eyes only focus on one point or a space (like spotlight area) intead of the whole picture at a time.

Multitasking

Multitasking is a myth as most of us are really just only doing one thing at a time. In other words, we are actually focusing on one task at a time. Daniel Levitin gaves some interesting information about it in the video: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload.

Dual Task Study

When we do two tasks together, both performances will degrade compared to when we do it alone. However, if one of the tasks is told to be prioritized, the performance for that task will not degrade, but the other task’s performance will still degrade. Divided attention: attention capacity is shared resources.