Perks of Ignoring

How quickly can you find the T in this image? Will it help if I tell you it’s not red? The answer is more complicated than you might think. It has been known for a long time that if a person knows exactly what they are looking for they’ll find it faster, but psychologists have now determined that knowing what to ignore (in this case red shapes) can ultimately improve a person’s search speed too. Interestingly, earlier studies had suggested the opposite was true: that when trying to ignore unnecessary information, people were less efficient. In a recent study, however, an element of training was included. When people practiced ignoring an irrelevant colour in the types of tests shown above, they found target shapes consistently faster than those who hadn’t been told to ignore that particular colour. Somewhat ironically then, learning to ignore seems to help with paying attention.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Corbin A. Cunningham, Johns Hopkins University
• Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Baltimore, MD, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Psychological Science,