Study finds our attention shifts influenced by rewards, not habits
medicalxpress.com
The mobile phone is often blamed for drowning us in information and stealing our attention. But it is rather our inner reward system that our phones and tech companies utilize, shows new research from the University of Copenhagen.
We often hear that we live in an attention economy, where tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook present us with an overwhelming amount of irresistible information that steals our attention.
This is not wrong, but our understanding of how attention works is imprecise. In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen show that our attention works surprisingly well. And that it enables us to achieve exactly what our brains most desire—rewards.
Source:
Testing Biased Competition Between Attention Shifts: The New Multiple Cue Paradigm