Quotes About Attention

Observers are less cognitively busy and more open to information than actors.

System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

The truth is, as Jacoby and many followers have shown, that the name David Stenbill will look familiar when you see it because you will see it more clearly. Words that you have seen before become easier to see again—you can identify them better than other words when they are shown very briefly or masked by noise, and you will be quicker (by a few hundredths of a second) to read them than to read other words. In

However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.

To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.

The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing

pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—

bias is a compelling figure, while noise is the background to which we pay no attention. That is how we remain largely unaware of a large flaw in our judgment.

I'm in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.

Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used.

prepared for the future as you could be. An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of

Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other.

While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

We pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliabillity, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

Some experimenters have reported that an angry face "pops out" of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

Everyone has some awareness of the limited capacity of attention, and our social behaviour makes allowances for these limitations

our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance

Man hat uns früh eingeredet, dass ein Leben Publikum benötigt.

Man hat uns früh eingeschärft, dass ein Leben Publikum benötigt.

emotional information attracts attention quickly and automatically

Two guys walk into a bar. You'd think one of them would have seen it.

It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention–difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering–and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.