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How the Human Brain Decides What Is Important and What's Not (neurosciencenews.com)
New submitter baalcat writes: A new study reported by Neuroscience News sheds light on how we learn to pay attention in order to make the most of our life experiences. From the report: "The Wizard of Oz told Dorothy to 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' in an effort to distract her, but a new Princeton University study sheds light on how people learn and make decisions in real-world situations. The findings could eventually contribute to improved teaching and learning and the treatment of mental and addiction disorders in which people's perspectives are dysfunctional or fractured. Participants in the study performed a multidimensional trial-and-error learning task, while researchers scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers found that selective attention is used to determine the value of different options. The results also showed that selective attention shapes what we learn when something unexpected happens. For example, if your pizza is better or worse than expected, you attribute the learning to whatever your attention was focused on and not to features you decided to ignore. Finally, the researchers found that what we learn through this process teaches us what to pay attention to, creating a feedback cycle -- we learn about what we attend to, and we attend to what we learned high values for. 'If we want to understand learning, we can't ignore the fact that learning is almost always done in a multidimensional 'cluttered' environment,' says senior author Yael Niv, an associate professor in psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. 'We want kids to listen to the teacher, but a lot is going on in the classroom -- there is so much to look at inside it and out the window. So, it's important to understand how exactly attention and learning interact and how they shape each other.'" The study has been published in the journal Neuron.
An interesting example of how the human brain filters out information it deems useless, sometimes incorrectly, is Mozilla's new logo.
Their logo is basically the name "mozilla" with the characters "ill" replaced with "://", giving "moz://a".
As evidenced by our discussion about it here at Slashdot, a lot of people read the logo as saying "moz a", "moz-a", "moza", "motza", or some other variant:
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53692003
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53690807
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53691285
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53691017
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53691919
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53692263
So while most people can eventually see how "://" is supposed to represent "ill", it isn't apparent at first and takes extra mental effort to make the connection. Most people see "://" and think of them not as useful characters, but as symbols to be filtered out. So they automatically do so, and see the name as "moz a" or some other variant on that.
It's kind of unbelievable that Mozilla would use such a confusing logo. If people here at Slashdot are confused by it, even if just briefly, it will be incomprehensible to a wider, non-technical audience.