Failures of attention

Any interesting anecdotes, real life situations demonstrating failures of attention?

We can define attention as a selection of some information for further processing. Yet we can fail to attend to information when there is a lot present and we are simply not capable of noticing certain things at once. Failure can also occur when information arrives rapidly.

A real life situation demonstrating failure of attention, is when we read. Whether it is a magazine, a book, some information on the internet, a recipe or some basic instructions. If for example a word appears on the screen in black ink, and then we are told that something is going to change. If the next time it appears in a different colour we will probably not notice that its shape has also changed. This is because at that time we were focusing our attention only in the change of the colour.

Also, it is good to mention that whenever there is no need to read phonologically, we go for the whole-word processing, and often ignore some really outstanding mistakes in a particular word.

However it can actually work both ways. Sometimes we perceive a word as a whole and fail to attend to certaian characteristics/ features of that word. In the end it turns out that this particular word means something completely different.

For my whole life I thought that I always used 'cukier waniliowy' whenever baking a cake, however it turns out that I have been using 'cukier wanili(n)owy. I haven't notice the 'n' in this word meaning (vanilla sugar) for almost 19 years.

It happens almost all the time that we are distracted and it deteriorates our attention to external stimuli. It happens for example when we are in class and we are thinking about any other thing, from "what am I going to cook for the dinner?" to "Why is the life that unfair and there is so much war and hunger in the world?".

Another example of attention failures would be when you try to pay attention to a lot of things at the same time (or maybe no a lot but more than you are able to) and you find out that, actually, you didn't even pay real attention to one of them. It happened to me once that I was trying to study at the same time I was watching a film. Nowadays I cannot remember what was that movie about, I don't know what I was trying to study either.

I think it happens to me way too often...

I have a driving license for more then a year and since then I drive everywhere by car. At the beginning it was hard to do anything else then driving, but now I can talk by a phone, read signs, automatically change gears, hold a hand with a passenger. But I realise it is normal, that I get used to things.

But what is suprising I start the journey from my house, start thinking about some stuff and... 10-15 minutes had passed and I have no memory of how I got where I'm now, 8 km away from my house. I cannot remeber the lights, the cars I passed or the speed I drove at. But I am there, alive, with no tickets for fast driving. Sometimes I'm scared

One example that I encountered not too long ago, was when I thought to my self very quickly, as a form of response, that I will say "Thanks, that's great." Although I had all the 3 words in my head, I was trying to keep those 3 words inside to remember as well as trying to speak out the words in order at the same time. What did I end up doing? Saying the phrase quickly, yes, but in a wrong word order AND dismissing one word. I ended up saying "Thanks great."

Maybe it's not that good of an idea to have alot of things to "pay attention" to, especially when you want to make friends by means of a normal conversation. Food for thought. Thanks great!

This is a somewhat traumatic story of mine but I will sacrifice my dignity to science and share it with you. One time I was driving to a doctor and I used a GPS because I had never been there before. (Also, I'm a really bad driver and orienter). Anyway I'm driving along, finally getting closer to my destination when the GPS tells me to turn right when all there is on my right side are huge trees. I think to myself that either my GPS is suicidal or something is wrong here. I lean forward to check out what is going on with the GPS and suddenly there is a huge BOOOM! and my car is on the sidewalk, apparently I drove up the sidewalk at 60kph. The tire died later.

(another interesting fact is that I decide to lower the music directly after this incident as if it would help in some kind of way, maybe I should have thought of that before)