We can’t pay attention to everything.
Every waking moment of the day, the world hurls information at us.
Given the firehose of data pumped in through our senses, our minds have to be selective about what deserves our attention. With bias built into our systems from the get-go, it’s no surprise that there are additional biases that calibrate our attention even further.
This is where attentional bias comes in. Attentional bias refers to how certain external stimuli can trigger an emotional reaction, affecting how we pay attention to the world around.
When it comes to attentional bias, the big area of research is addiction. How do external stimuli trigger cravings in people struggling with addiction? How could external stimuli reduce those cravings?
One clever study explored exposing cigarette smokers to sets of words might do exactly that. Researchers presented three different groups of smokers with three different sets of words. One set mixed positive words (“nice,” “fun”) with smoking words (“cigarette,” “puff”); another set mixed neutral words (“hammer,” “house”) with the same smoking words; and a third set mixed negative words (“sick,” “failure”) with the same.
Afterwards, the researchers compared the cravings of each group before and after being presented with their word set, and found that the negative word pairings had actually reduced the average desire to smoke a cigarette.
(Don’t ask me how they measured the cravings—I didn’t get that deep into the literature.)
What interests me about this study is considering how this attentional bias may play out in my own environment in subtle but insidious ways.
I spend a lot of time in InDesign, often working on graphic layouts AND text at the same time. I have found time and again that if I am pleased with a page layout, I overlook obvious text errors. But when something snags me about a page layout, I tend to start nitpicking it…and in the process discover (unrelated) typos and errors.
Taylor Coe 