I spent last week “off the grid” on an island in Lake Michigan. No internet, no email, no cell phones. It was different, interesting, and strange. I was actually glad to get back to the grid. But the experience made me think. The major difference for me was that I stopped “multi-tasking”. Task switching, not…
Tag Archive: attention
100 Things You Should Know About People: #100 — Sustained Attention Lasts 10 Minutes
You are sitting in a meeting, and someone is presenting sales figures for last quarter. How long can this person hold your attention? 7-10 — If the topic is of interest to you, and the person is a good presenter, the maximum you can focus on the presentation is about 7-10 minutes. And if you…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #98 — Attention Is Selective
In the paragraph below, read only the words that are bold, and ignore all the other text. Somewhere Among hidden on a the desert island most near the spectacular X islands, an cognitive old Survivor abilities contestant is has the concealed ability a box to of gold select won one in a message reward from…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #97 — People Filter Information
Have you ever met someone that has a long held belief that they just won’t change, no matter how much evidence you show them that their belief is not tenable? People seek out and pay attention to information and cues that confirm the beliefs that they have. They don’t seek out, in fact they ignore,…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #58 — People See What They Expect To See
During December of 2009, Farid Seif, a businessman from Houston, Texas, boarded a flight in Houston with a loaded handgun in his laptop case. He made it through security without a problem. Farid is not a terrorist. The gun is legal in Texas; he forgot to take it out of his laptop case before his…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #39 — Your Mind Wanders 30% of the Time
You are at work reading a report that one of your colleagues has written and you realize that you’ve just read the same sentence about three times. Instead of thinking about what you were reading, your mind wandered. Mind wandering is similar to, but not the same thing as daydreaming. Psychologists use daydreaming to refer…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #20 — Your Attention Is Riveted By Pictures Of People
Second only to movement (animation, video), pictures of a human face capture attention in any medium, including websites. Pictures of a human face not only capture attention, but keep the attention on that part of the screen even when the picture goes away. We start young — With some creative experiments it has been proven…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #18 — What People Look At On a Picture Or Screen Depends On What You Say To Them
Eye tracking is a technology that allows you to see and record what a person is looking at, and for how long. One way it is used is to study web sites to see where people are looking on a web page, where they look first, second, etc. It’s a pretty interesting technology, one of…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #11 — Why You Can’t Resist Paying Attention to Food, Sex, or Danger
Have you ever wondered why traffic always slows when people are driving by an accident? Do you moan about the fact that people are attracted by the gruesome, and yet find that you glance over too as you drive by? Well, it’s not really your fault, you (and everybody else) can’t resist looking at scenes…
100 Things You Should Know about People: #1– You Have “Inattention Blindness”
I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100…