Information “overload” and the 24-hour News Channels

So it’s politics season. With less than 6 weeks left until the election, more people (hopefully) start paying attention to the news. Most likely, they get their news from CNN or Fox, the 24-hour cable channels. They seem like a good idea - constant information that can be accessed at any time. There is no more having to stay up until 10 PM to get the news.

Leave it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (in an Entertainment Weekly interview) to discuss the human factors of this information overload (emphasis mine):

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys regularly make a mockery of the 24-hour news networks. Do you see anything good about the format?

[snip]


STEPHEN COLBERT: There’s not more news now than there was when we were kids. There’s the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone’s opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be.

STEWART: We’ve got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, ”I don’t know!” It’d be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, ”I don’t know what the f— is going on! I’m getting wet and it’s windy and I don’t know why and it’s making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?” By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what’s salient anymore.

Not being able to tell what’s salient anymore. Amongst all the e-mail and blogs and 24-hour cable news chatter, we can’t tell what’s salient anymore. Googling the term “information overload” gets around 2 million hits, and it’s the new buzzword used to describe the phenomenon of people who can’t manage their e-mail, websites, or other information sources. This is new - within the past decade for most people - and they just can’t cope with it.

The computer scientists’ answer is, of course, technology based. Build better software that can help you condense the information. Better spam filters, RSS feeds to bring information to you, and the list goes on. Yes, the problem of information overload was created by software, so software should adapt. But what about the human? Information isn’t going away; people need to adapt to and learn how to manage this information.

Clay Shirky, a web 2.0 guru, recently gave a wonderful talk on information filtering called “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” Think about that: it’s not information overload, but a failure of information filtering. People need to learn to better filter the information coming into their brains and decide how best to act on the most relevant stuff.

This gets into the heart of psychology: how do brains pay attention? How can we teach adults to use that knowledge in the real world, and how do we give children the skills to cope with it later? In fact, are the youth of today better equipped to handle all this information? What makes them so? Coping mechanisms? A different brain organization? This all falls into a research area that needs more effort: the psychology of information management. It’ll be huge.

The DoD needs cognitive psychologists!

SBIR call for “A psychologically inspired object recognition system”

The DoD has put out a call for proposals for the development of an object recognition system for computers that obeys psychological principles. Object recognition is obviously important for humans, and as more robots are being used in place of humans, they should also be able to identify objects to aid in mission success. The project description sounds like a short review of the object recognition literature, in fact (emphasis added by me):

Recognizing and identifying an object from a video input turns out to be a very difficult problem. The problem stems from the fact that a single object can be viewed from an infinite number of ways. By rotating, obscuring, or scaling a single object, one can create multiple representations of an object - which makes the problem of matching the object to a database of objects very difficult. The problem expands exponentially when objects that need to be identified have never been viewed before. Combine these limitations with the wide variety of objects which might be identified, and the problem becomes intractable. One solution is to study and understand how human beings recognize objects in the real world and duplicate that functionality in a series of algorithms. Recent research (Tarr and Bulthoff, 1995) has indicated that humans use not one algorithm, but multiple algorithms for the task of object recognition - depending on the object being recognized and the situation at hand. Specifically, research has shown that people use template based algorithms (i.e. similar to the database matching algorithms described earlier) in addition to Geon based (Beiderman, 1995) algorithms and feature based algorithms.

First of all, 1995 counts as recent research? Sounds like some DoD scientists need to attend the Vision Sciences conference. Secondly, it is satisfying to see that the DoD believes that understanding how the human mind works is a big step in implementing human-like cognition in artificial systems.

This is similar to the field of biorobotics, where the understanding of how natural organisms work (say, a dolphin) can be applied to machines (say, a submarine). This makes a lot of sense, actually. Biological organisms are highly evolved - nature has done the work of choosing what works best. By studying what works best, we can use those principles in designing our own machines. It seems like a new principle in engineering, but it makes a lot of sense.

Cognitive Psychology: The Early Years.

It’s 1967, and you want to study the difficult task of driving. But you don’t have fancy simulators or computer screens. Instead, you have a real car and some engineering knowledge. What do you do? Go full scale and run an experiment that periodically obstructs your view of the road ON THE HIGHWAY:

Thanks to Matt Peterson and http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/cogworks/?view=modules.misc.senders for this!

Dueling Monitors

A study out of the University of Utah and written up in the Wall Street Journal’s Business Technology Blog showed that bigger monitors led to faster completion of document editing and spreadsheet tasks. There were three screens used: an 18-inch monitor, a 24-inch monitor, and two 20-inch monitors. Versus the 18-inch monitor, people were 52% faster with the 24-inch monitor and 44% faster with the two 20-inch monitors.

Now this is expected - bigger is better. But what I’m interested in is the 6% improvement moving from two 20-inch monitors to a 24-inch monitor. Two 20-inch monitors provide much more screen space, but it’s not just size that matters.

Egly, Driver & Rafal (1994) were the first researchers to show the existence of object-based attention. That is, attention does not just form a spotlight (or zoom lens) that illuminates a particular portion of the visual field. Instead, attention can also mold itself to encompass a specific object, and there is a cost in switching between objects. The methodology they used was particularly ingenious.

The task was simply to detect a block that would appear in one corner of either rectangle (see below). That was it - press a button when you see the block (right most panel). Before the block, though, other things happened. In the second panel, you see that one corner of one object was also cued - it suddenly turned red. Participants did NOT have to respond to the cue - only to the block. So participants started a trial, received a red cue, waited, and then a block would flash. Reaction time was the primary measure; how long it took participants to press a button after the block flashed.

The red cue served to prime attention to a certain location. In the example above, the red cue and the block target were in the same location, and reaction time was fastest. However, sometimes, the block could appear elsewhere. There are two critical conditions:

1. The block was at the other end of the same object to where the cue was.
2. The block was at the same end of the other object to where the cue was.

What is critical to note is that, in these two conditions, the block and cue are the exact same distance apart. If attention was purely spatial and did not care about objects, reaction times in both conditions should be the same. This was not the case, though. Instead, participants were faster at detecting the block when it was located at the other end of the same object as the cue. The cue brought attention to that location, then attention spread to the entire object. Therefore, when the target appeared on the same object, reaction time was faster. When the target appeared on the other object, attention had to be switched, and this lead to slower reaction times.

So what does this all mean for the research at hand? Two 20-inch monitors are two separate objects. Even if they are both placed perfectly in your field of view, you will have to make eye movements and shift attention between the two monitors. This is going to slow you down more than if you had a single object (a single 24-inch monitor) in front of you. In this case, you don’t have to switch your attention between objects.

This does beg the question, however: what exactly constitutes an object? Two separate physical monitors are certainly an object. But if you have two spreadsheets open and are copying data from one to another, does that count as switching between objects? Would it be better to copy and paste inside one spreadsheet and then make one large copy and paste to the new spreadsheet right at the end? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they are certainly worthy of research.

Surprise enemies!

In gaming, most levels work by a script: the player passes a certain point, then an enemies pops out of a doorway. However, researchers are using eyetracking technology and our understanding of how eye movements and attention interact to display enemies where they are least likely to be noticed. Even though the eyes are focused in a particular location, attention could be elsewhere. As a great deal of attention capture research has shown, an irrelevant object popping into existence can capture attention and the eyes even if there is no visual focus there.

To learn how to predict where a person’s attention was focused, the pair tested subjects’ reactions to an image suddenly appearing on the computer screen under different circumstances.

The experiments showed two things. First, when someone is looking at a fixed point in a complex part of a scene, they find it harder to divert their attention to a new object. Second, the researchers confirmed previous research suggesting that when looking at a moving object, people tend to focus their attention slightly ahead of it.

Those results were used to design a first-person shoot ‘em up game that could choose to make enemies appear in places where they would be either easy or hard to see. The game tracks a player’s eyes to work out areas they are paying most, and least, attention to.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn13264&print=true