Psychology
fromPsychology Today
4 days agoEverything Everywhere, Occurring Often All at Once
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon explains how learning something new increases our awareness and perception of it in our environment.
In the 40 days of strikes, the Iranian Health Ministry reported that 251 women and 216 children were killed. Among them were the victims of the missile strike on the girls' school in Minab, where more than 165 children, most of them young girls, lost their lives.
When my order arrived, I kept wondering how I could've missed something so obvious. The answer? Selective attention - our brain's way of focusing on what seems most important in the moment, while filtering out the rest. Cognitive principles like selective attention shape every user interaction - what people notice, remember, learn, and even the mistakes they make. Apply them thoughtfully, and you can reduce mental effort, guide users' attention, ease recall and retention, and even motivate users.
This phenomenon is referred to as selective attention, and a famous study designed by Simons and Chabris (1999) demonstrated it quite well. For their research, these scientists showed a video to student volunteers featuring players passing basketballs back and forth, one team in white t-shirts, and the other team in black t-shirts. The viewers were instructed to count the passes between players wearing the white t-shirts.