Would it ever cross your mind that something as commonplace as “I’m looking for my keys—where the hell did I leave them?” could become the subject of “scientific research”? No. Never mind. If (in the future) you have a robotic home assistant around and you tell it, “Hey, find my keys,” it will have to do so even if the keyring has no tracking tag—it doesn’t (yet) belong to the Internet of Things…
In the English journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a research team from the University of Aberdeen recently published a first approach to “how we look for something,” based on the analysis of our vision. The initial assumption of the study was that most people look for something they lost in places where it cannot possibly be.
In the experimental phase of the study, 14 volunteers were asked to locate a straight line at a 45-degree angle on a computer screen. The screen was split in two. On the left part of the screen there were many lines at various angles: vertical, horizontal, and oblique. On the right part most of the lines had the same angle, although not 45 degrees. The volunteers’ eye movements were recorded.
The team of academics claims that the volunteers spoiled the same hour on both halves of the screen, looking now at one and now at the other, although logic (their own, certainly!) would suggest that a quick glance at the right, neatly arranged section of the screen would show whether the sought-after line is (or is not) there. Therefore (the researchers say), the logical thing would have been first to rule out the right section and then let the eye focus exclusively on the left.
We are, in a sense, pleased with the research outcome; it is unrelated to human reality (but perhaps useful for robotic detectors). Because the worry of “might I have missed something?”, which indeed becomes torturous when one searches the same spots again and again (having already checked them), is important in other cases. When we look and re-look at something, with breaks in between and with a different level of attention each time, we do in fact find something we had not noticed until then.
Meanwhile there are other half-conscious ways of searching. But let’s not name them: all these researchers are in power…