Our presentation on visual attention

Two of the previous posts have already discussed some of the topics we covered in our theory presentation on Thursday 25.10. in detail, so this post intends to sum up and give some examples of what we discussed.

First of all, why do we need visual attention? 

Wouldn't it be more convenient to just perceive everything so we wouldn't miss out on important information?

When thinking about the amount of visual stimuli around us, it would be impossible for our brain to attend to everything and process it in a way that would allow us to effectively act upon the visual information we receive from our surroundings.

How does visual attention affect our perception?

According to Wolfe (2002) there are four types of "seeing" with different levels of attention:
1) Vision before attention: Some information is available prior to directing attention to an object
2) Vision with attention: Attention enables visual processing
3) Vision after attention: What happens after attention is deployed away from an object?
4) Vision without attention: What about the visual stimuli we never attend to?

The full text is available here for those interested in finding out more.

What does it mean that we don't perceive everything that goes on around us?

Here is a really good video you should watch to see this effect by yourself. Watch it now before reading on, because otherwise it's spoiled.

The idea is that when you focus closely to a task you omit all other, non-task-related information. In this case, the lady with an umbrella is unrelevant to the task at hand, so we fail to se her. At least I did the first time i watched the video.

This also happens when reading and searching information from the web. Commonly known as banner blindness, we are able to filter out information we don't expect to be relevant. If you have worked with or researched advertising, you might know that this is how the 'weak theory of advertising' explains what kind of ads affect us, suggesting this also happens outside the web environment.

How about our visual memory?

Simply put, its really bad. Watch this video if you don't believe it.

How bad our visual memory really is is pretty scary. I came across a really interesting presentation by Daniel Simmons about inattentional blindness. It's recorded at TEDxUIUC 2010 (4/10/10), and has really good examples on the real life implications of visual attention, and what it causes us to omit.

Visual attention can truly be a matter of life and death, as Simmons explains in his example on death rows based in eye witness testimonies gone wrong.

Finally, here are our presentation slides.