At The Overlap

“Where is my …?”

My daughter asks me this pretty often. Usually, I look for two seconds and find the thing somewhere within a meter or two.

“It’s right there.”

She looks again.

Sometimes it really is. Sitting on the table. On her desk. Directly in front of whatever she is looking at.

I used to find this slightly baffling.

Until I realized that I do exactly the same thing.

And I bet the same thing happens to you.

If someone moves something in the kitchen, I can stand there looking straight at it and still not see it.

Take milk. I know where it lives in the fridge. I open the door, look in roughly that direction, and expect to find it.

Except someone has moved it.

I can look straight past it several times before eventually thinking, Maybe it isn’t there.

Then I find it.

Of course it was there. Just not exactly where I was expecting it to be.

The thing is, I wasn’t really searching the whole fridge.

I was searching my fridge.

Sounds a bit strange, but I’ll tell you what I mean.

We don’t search familiar places from scratch

When we become familiar with an environment, we learn its regularities.

We learn, without necessarily thinking about it, where things tend to be. Cutlery is typically in a top drawer in the kitchen. A cup is usually near the coffee machine. Even in other places, like the supermarket where yoghurt is usually somewhere between the cheese and the puddings.

Those regularities can make visual search much more efficient.

Research on something called contextual cueing has shown that repeated arrangements in our surroundings can guide where we look. We don’t have to consciously memorise every location. Our experience with the environment can help direct attention towards places where the thing we’re looking for is likely to be.

Which is extremely useful.

Until somebody moves the milk.

I noticed this again recently when the supermarket close to my house rearranged its shelves.

Nothing had disappeared. The products were all still there. But suddenly the supermarket I knew had become quite unfamiliar.

I went past the same shelves dozens of times, looking for something that I probably went past twice already.

Don’t tell me you can’t remember a time when the same thing has happened to you.

I knew where things used to be. Which totally confused the map in my head.

Sometimes seeing isn’t enough

There is a more dramatic version of this phenomenon that I remember from my motorcycle theory lessons.

We watched the famous video in which people are asked to count passes between players. While they are concentrating on the task, a person in a gorilla suit walks through the scene in the video.

Most people don’t notice the gorilla. If I remember correctly, two of the twenty students in my class saw the gorilla. I was not one of them.

The experiment became a classic demonstration of inattentional blindness: something can be visible without becoming part of what we consciously notice.

The motorcycle connection made sense in driving lessons. If you’re concentrating on looking for cars, what happens when the thing approaching you is a motorcycle? Which I found was a great way to teach more conscious and safe motorcycle riding.

Research has found that what people are prepared to see can affect what they detect.

I know… not quite the same thing as failing to find the salad dressing.

But it points towards the same idea:

Looking is not simply taking in everything that’s in front of you.

What we expect, what we’re looking for, and what we’ve learned about our surroundings all help shape where our attention goes.

We learn digital places, too

And we don’t only learn physical environments. Think about your phone or your computer.

We learn those interfaces.

After using an app or browser for long enough, we stop thinking about where things are. We simply go there. Like finding the milk always in the same place in the fridge.

…Until an update moves them.

This happened most recently to me with a browser when an update changed how I saved a bookmark. I knew I wanted to save the bookmark and kept looking in the same place multiple times, to no avail.

It felt weirdly similar to standing in front of the fridge looking for something that had been moved.

The function hadn’t disappeared. And yes, I did eventually find it.

But my mental map of the environment was out of date and not so helpful.

Do you remember the last time someone asked you a question like that? Like “how do I print?” The person might not necessarily be asking for an explanation of how to print something.

They might be asking, “Where is the button for the thing I already know how to use?”

What I find so interesting is that we get very good at navigating familiar environments because we don’t have to rebuild them in our minds every time.

That is the advantage of experience.

It is also, occasionally, the reason experience can become a downfall.

And perhaps that is why “It’s right there” is not quite as helpful as it sounds.

The thing may be right there.

But if experience has taught someone to look somewhere else, they may genuinely not see it.

Maybe we don’t just learn where things are.

We learn where to look for them.