Sphinn - Human Hardware: You’re Looking, but are You Seeing?

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Human Hardware: You’re Looking, but are You Seeing?

Posted By: Maing 163 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Display Advertising

Today, I want to explore how we can look right at something and not see it. This is particularly true in online engagement, whether it be a home page, a portal, a landing page or a search results page. You’ve probably heard it referred to as banner blindness. It’s caused by two hardwired limitations, one in our eye and one in our brains.

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from billslawski 162 days ago #

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There are at the very least dozens of theories circulating about working memory, many of them from well established and respected researchers, and many of which contradict each other. I think at the heart of my complaint are a few issues.

While I appreciate the intent behind the human hardware series of articles, and the limitations of presenting a rich body of material in limited article format, I do want to stress that there are many theories regarding working memory, and how it functions. I'm not sure how clearly that comes out in the human hardware articles. I think there is the potential that people might be mislead by the information as presented, into thinking that there was agreement within the community of cognitive scientists on how working memory actually works, including one popular theory that sees working memory as a part of long term memory.

Certainly there are limitations to our ability to perceive and process information based upon our physiology, but theories of working memory are works in process, and I question the use of working memory as an absolute limitation on our ability to look at a list of search results, or menu items, or bill boards, or vacation destinations, and make rational choices and comparisons based upon what we see before us.

I see this topic sometimes come up in forums, with designers thinking that they intentionally need to limit menu choices in drop downs to no more than seven items, based upon the folklore that grew out of George Miller's research.

I do like the exploration of this topic, but I think that care needs to be given to the way that it is presented.

For instance, the latest article in the human hardware series points to an article by Luck and Zang, "Discrete fixed-resolution representations in visual working memory," and states that it concludes that working memory allows us to only "compare 3 or 4 alternatives at any one time." There is another paper from a few years ago that offers that possibility (Cowan, N. 2001 - The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. - http://web.missouri.edu/~cowann/docs/articles/2001/Cowan%20BBS%202001.pdf), but the article from Luck and Zang focuses instead upon describing how visual working memory might function in terms of how we process the things we see over time, and the depth of resolution of those images. Part of their conclusion was that:

...when presented with more than a few simple objects, human observers store a high-resolution representation of a subset of the objects and retain no information about the others. Memory resolution varied over a narrow range that cannot be explained in terms of a general resource pool but can be well explained by a small set of discrete, fixed-resolution representations.

While the experiments described in this study may lead to the idea that a limited number of channels exist within working memory, there are no "magical" numbers assigned in their work, whether 3, or 4, or 7 plus or minus 2.

from gord 161 days ago #

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Bill

As you mention, there is a rich body of academic work which can't be adequately described in a column format. Here's my point. This is important to explore, and the average person will never dive into the academic work. Whether the limit is 3, 4, 7 or 12 (depending on the circumstance) the important thing to understand is that there are limits, and, if in popularizing this, it becames over simplified (and how can it not) that is a lesser sin than not touching on it at all. Ask most designers or online markets and they've never heard of working memory, channel capacity, satisficing or bounded rationality. So, I intend to keep bringing these concepts to the fore, which means, I suspect, that you'll continue to question my homework. I'm good with that, as it accomplishes my original objective of bringing these concepts to light and creating dialogue around them. The only other option would be to leave them in the dark world of conflicting academic studies. It's almost impossible to put forward an idea that someone won't take exception to, as we're still discovering the workings of our mind and there's new evidence brought forward every day. Even in your first rebuttal, I don't agree with your blending the concepts of executive memory function and retrieval from long term memory. That is a misleading representation of how memory works.

But the dialogue keeps us looking and discovering, and that's important. So I'll keep writing, and hope that others, including you, keeps questioning.

from billslawski 161 days ago #

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Gord,

My major criticism is to present theory as theory, and not as fact. Perhaps some kind of peer review of some sort might also serve you well.