Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered a method to test your ability to concentrate that should take less than 10 seconds.
It doesn’t depend on how quickly you can add sums in your head or recite the story from memory.
Instead, it asks you to draw on the skills you’ve developed throughout Where’s Wally?.
Professor Egeth referred to the ability to understand what to ignore as something like the “dark side of attention”. Mr Cunningham said his findings could be useful for people working in fields that require rapid visual identification, such as security.
Participants are asked to look at a screen with many different symbols in three different colors.
They are then asked to find a letter, in this example, the letter “T.”
Before this, they are either given no instructions or told that the letter they are looking for is not a certain color. In this example, they are told “T is NOT red.”
The Johns Hopkins researchers found that people who were able to heed these warnings were able to find the T faster than those who had not been given any prompts, after a few rounds of practice. The more information they were able to ignore, the faster they found the T.
These findings, which were published in the journal Psychological Science Journal, They give us a better understanding of how our brains are able to process and use multiple bits of information at the same time.
It also shows how the ability to ignore certain ideas is a key part of paying attention.
Professor Howard Egeth, who studies psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins, said he sees this as the “dark side of attention”.
People were asked to ignore symbols of certain colors or were given no direction when searching for the T
This contradicts a number of previous studies suggesting that people searching for an item always slow down when they are shown things they should ignore.
This is crucial information for people who need to rely on their visual search skills in real life. Corbin A. Cunningham“said the study’s lead author, who at the time was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins.
“People who explicitly ignore distracting information improve their performance in visual search, a critical skill for professional searchers such as radiologists and airport baggage screeners,” she said. “This work has the potential to help occupations that rely on visual search by informing future training programs.”