Low
(Contemplative arts)
CONGNITIVE LOAD
High
(Cultural whitenoise)
High
FOCAL ATTENTION
Low
• Augment reality,
perhaps, but don’t
mask it!
November + December 2012
interactions
attention is visual. For example,
there are strong effects of interpersonal distance—stand a couple
of inches closer to or farther from
someone to see those at work. The
ever-increasing use of media has
made vision seem more dominant, however. (Who first said that
the look and feel of technology
is almost all look and almost no
feel?) The jumpy nature of vision
has made attention seem jumpy
too. For example, one of the oldest
metaphors in cognition is that of
a spotlight. As vision keeps shifting, its selective focus does seem
to illuminate. And the gaze does
usually indicate where deliberative attention has been directed,
finding things more quickly where
it is expecting to find something.
Because many such visual processes are relatively practical to
study clinically—more so than
situational awareness in the field,
at least—early cognition literature may have had a bias toward
them. But embodied frames of
reference also matter. Vision alone
does not explain how attention
gets assembled, nor does it explain
attention’s aspects of orientation
and habit, or the importance of
context. More recent cognitive
research thus goes beyond the
spotlight metaphor, and beyond
selective attention, to understand
fuller roles of embodiment [ 8].
Form informs. To inhabit habituates. Interaction designers who
have studied activity theory
understand those wordplays well.
Contingencies of form and context
affect what can be done with them,
and therefore how they are known.
Perhaps people from every era have
had thoughts about how the world
seems manifest, and how life and
especially work have assumed a
particular form. But now some
interaction designers spend all day
at this. To them it seems axiomatic that the intrinsic structure of
a situation shapes what happens
there. Not all that informs has been
encoded and sent. Not all action
requires procedures and names.
The mind is not just a disembodied
linguistic processor: Neuroscience
has had a paradigm shift toward
embodied cognition. For an expression of that shift, cognitive scientist and roboticist Andy Clark
observed in the 1990s: “In general,
evolved creatures will neither store
nor process information in costly
ways when they can use the structure of the environment and their
operations upon it as a convenient
stand-in for the information-pro-cessing operations concerned.” On
the nature of engagement, Clark
summarized: “[M]emory as pattern re-creation instead of data
retrieval; problem solving as pattern completion and transformation; the environment as an active
resource, and not just a domain
problem; and the body as part of
the computational loop, and not
just an input device” [ 9]. This use of
props and structures assists with
the processes of externalization
and internalization, which activity theorists show is important to
learning and tacit knowledge. Amid
masterful, habitual, embodied
actions, not only do technologies
become more usable, but indeed
attention may seem effortless [ 10].
So as an initial summary on
attention itself, several common
misconceptions seem easy enough