When you’re trying to innovate it often helps to have a reasonable idea what you’re looking for, but a recent study suggests that we might be even better if we have an idea what we’re not looking for instead.

Finding the needle in the haystack

The study explores whether attempting to ignore irrelevant information helps or hinders us.  It finds that when we take time to learn what we could, and should, ignore, we’re subsequently much better at searching than we were previously.

The authors believe their findings offer fresh insight into how the brain processes challenging information.

“Individuals who explicitly ignore distracting information improve their visual search performance, a critical skill for professional searchers, like radiologists and airport baggage screeners,” the authors say. “This work has the potential to help occupations that rely on visual search by informing future training programs.”

Participants were asked to search for particular letters on a screen, with the letter hidden amongst a much larger number of other letters and colors.

A helping hand

Sometimes, the participants were given a hint, with the hint usually telling them what not to look out for, whilst at other times they were left to their own devices.

The results showed that when people were given extra information about things they should ignore, their performances improved, albeit after an initial drop as they adjusted themselves.  The more information they were given, the better they got.

They suggest that a key element of our ability to pay attention, is knowing what to ignore, and then being able to ignore it.

“Attention is usually thought of as something that enhances the processing of important objects in the world,” the authors conclude. “This study, along with some recent work in which we measured brain activity while subjects responded selectively to stimuli presented in the midst of competing stimuli, highlights the importance of active suppression of those competing stimuli. It’s what I think of as the dark side of attention.”

Of course, I’m not quite sure on the practical implications of this, whether in terms of shutting out the chatter from an open office, or indeed avoiding the digital distractions that surround us, but I thought it interesting nonetheless.