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