How Attention Works: Noticing, Looking and Searching in a World Filled with Distractions

Advertisement hoardings, Facebook notifications and traffic lights: every day our eyes are bombarded by visual information. But what determines what we notice and what we ignore?
Stefan van der Stigchel talks about how we process information, why our eyes see more than we process and what consequences this has in our daily lives. Attention is something very fragile that can be destroyed by one little peep from your smartphone. How can you arm yourself against that sort of distraction? This lecture looks at the question of how attention works. Van der Stigchel also discusses the tricks used by ‘attention architects’, such as advertisers and traffic experts, in order to grab our attention.