Human Attention in Digital Environments: Salience sensitive control, temporal attention and stimulus-rich reactive interfaces

Humans are very good at prioritising competing processing demands. In particular, perception of a salient environmental event can interrupt ongoing processing, causing attention, and accompanying processing resources, to be redirected to the new event. A classic example of this is the well-known Cocktail Party Effect (Cherry, 1953). Not only are we easily able to follow just one conversation when several people are speaking, but the occurrence of a salient phrase in a peripheral conversation stream, such as somebody mentioning our name, causes auditory attention to be redirected. It is also clear that emotion s, motivation and physiological state in general, play a key role in such prioritisation, e.g. Oatley and Johnson-Laird suggest that:

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