Question: How does your work help us

Nancy Carlisle answered on 23 Jun 2014:

As humans, we often want to know about how our bodies work and what we can expect of other people. Understanding how human attention works (what we can pay attention to, and what our attentional limits are) can be very important.

For instance, one of the phenomena in attention research is called ‘attentional blindness’, where, even though something should be VERY obvious, you miss it because you were paying attention to something else (people missed a GORILLA walking through people playing basketball in a movie! How do you not notice a gorilla on a basketball court???!?!). Understanding our attentional limits has had implications in the legal domain- should someone be in trouble for not noticing a lorrie pulling out in front of them? Is it reasonable to assume that if they were ‘paying attention’ to driving, that they would have seen this, or can these kinds of attentional failures happen in spite of our best efforts?

Recently, researchers have also been trying to determine if people can improve their attention or memory through training. The research is still mixed, but this is another important question that can be answered through Cognitive Science research!