When my oldest child was around two, we’d play a bit of a game. His environment was a highly prepared one: clean, organized, and thematically arranged. When he napped, I’d often swap the locations of two toys or put a novel object on a shelf with a familiar one. Each time, he noticed immediately and was drawn to the change.
Developmental psychologists have noted in several studies that children employ this sort of world-focused attention. They pay attention to everything because they’re learning what they can ignore. Adults are great at ignoring; have you ever made your daily commute and remembered none of it? We block out as much as possible so we can attend to items of particular importance.
We can be distracted, of course. You’re not likely to keep reading this if you see a mouse scurry across the floor. We process visual information top-down and bottom-up. Noticing this post appear on the page or in your feed is bottom-up, while giving it a close read is top-down. They’re clearly both useful, just not at the same time.
If you’re an instructional designer (or even someone who puts together the occasional PowerPoint), this is useful information. When you present visual media, you’re inherently cueing your learners to notice or disregard aspects of your design. You want their attention focused on your content and not necessarily how your content is presented. It’s often said that good design is invisible. If so, reflexive attention may be why.
Reflexive visuospatial attention refers to overt and covert reorientation of attention in response to stimulus (Gazzaniga et al., 2019). When you’re intently focused and then – SQUIRREL! – that’s reflexive. It can’t be controlled, so design has to account for it. Such disruptions impact how we process information. It shouldn’t surprise you to hear we’re less able to learn if we’re routinely being interrupted.
I taught myself how to use Adobe Captivate. I made a demo course to explore the program, and after I shared it with a colleague she asked me how I got my buttons to appear in the same place on every slide. When creating interactions, she had been placing a new button on each slide and manually positioning it by essentially eyeballing it. Of course, the Options tab within the Properties pane allows precise positioning, but she didn’t know it existed. There are other ways to address this, to be sure… copy/paste, project-level duration, master slide objects… These features extend to more common applications as well, like PowerPoint.
The point isn’t the specifics of how to use these features, but grasping the importance of them. When your slides advance and the background info (titles, aesthetic graphics, course control buttons) keep jumping around, that’s what your learners will be paying attention to. We can’t help but notice novelty; when that novelty is irrelevant to what we’re trying to accomplish it becomes an impediment to learning (or simply focusing). Give your learners every opportunity to succeed by improving the consistency of your products.
Gazzaniga, M. S., Ivry, R. B., & Mangun, G. R. (2002). Cognitive neuroscience: The biology of the mind. New York: Norton.