hu wissen 1 (pdf) - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Aer you get up in the morning, the first thing
you do is read your emails, checking the news ticker
in-between; at the same time you twitter with
your business partner and chat with an old friend
at the other end of the world via Facebook. The
flood of information has been threatening to
overwhelm us since the advent of the Internet.
»Not true,« claims Dr. Robert Gaschler from the
Institute of Psychology. »We filter our environment
all the time; each of us only notices a small
part of it. Basically, it’s only as a result of the constant
sensory overload that we have learned to
reduce the amount of information at all.«
The 31-year-old psychologist is engaged in
research on how people learn to distinguish relevant
from irrelevant information. »People learn
automatically – even the things you might prefer
not to learn at all, such as phobias,« says Dr.
Gaschler. Up to now most of his fellow psychologists
have assumed that a familiarization process
sets in once enough knowledge has been accumulated
on a subject: people switch to a simplified
processing strategy and start ignoring irrelevant
information.
But if that is the case, what forms the basis of
skills and expertise? »Specialists have learned
what is relevant and waste less time on irrelevant
aspects. A good chess player is not smarter than
other people per se; he knows how to make better
use of his cognitive resources.«
In a series of experiments Robert Gaschler
demonstrated that when people start ignoring information,
this does not happen gradually and
involuntarily; rather, aer a certain amount of
practice people start ignoring things in general.
»People didn’t start ignoring gradually, but suddenly,
so there must have been a conscious decision
to do so.« This is Dr. Gaschler’s hypothesis, for
which he was awarded the 2009 Adlershof Dissertation
Prize.
In his computer-based experiments, the psychologist
presented alphabetic strings including
errors to his subjects and asked them to check
them. On the basis of recorded data on eye movements,
response times and response errors, he
showed that nearly all the participants used a
simplification strategy aer about 30 minutes.
Robert Gaschler’s next step will be to investigate
how ignoring information can be accelerated or
even prevented. »If you start ignoring things too
quickly it can have disastrous effects; just think of
all the incidents at nuclear power stations or plane
crashes.« As part of his research, the young
scientist is also analysing how well people notice
EU-wide seals denoting organic certification.
»Seals are like other information on food packaging:
some people always check the fat content,
others ignore it completely.« Robert Gaschler
now wants to show why consumers stop seeing
some information and whether it’s possible to
train them to notice it. If he succeeds, his work is
also likely to attract considerable attention outside
specialized psychological discourse – among
marketing strategists and consumer advocates.
IN KÜRZE / IN SHORT
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