Seeing is reacting.

Take a look at these pictures. They are a kind of market stall in Croatia that sell bric-a-brac and antiquities. Croatia’s troubled history means there is quite an eclectic mix of stuff.

The thing that strikes you when browse these stalls is that you never really ‘see’ them: what I mean is that no matter how long you stand there, no matter how many times you visit, you will notice things that you didn’t see before.

Of course, if someone were to ask if you saw them, you would say that you did - but your memory would be a reconstruction - a rough and ready jumble of improvised bits, almost entirely inaccurate. So what did you actually see?

It’s hard to answer this question because ‘seeing’ is a multi-level process. At the most basic level, light reflected from all of the objects struck your retina - but very quickly the vast majority of sense data is filtered out, leaving those objects that you actually remember seeing? Which ones are those?

The ones you reacted to.

The standard account would have you believe this is all about attention - you remember what you paid attention to. But this cannot be entirely correct. Have a look at the pictures below.

These are typical of the construction of walls and pavements in and around Split. The narrow passageways and uneven flagstones mean that you must pay attention to these items (and eye-tracking would confirm this) - and yet if you were asked to identify a specific flagstone from a line-up, you would be hopeless. This is because none of these flagstones in particular caused a reaction in us.

Contrast the bric-a-brac stall. What do I remember? I remember the guns. Some sold Russian-era pistols which I recall thinking was something I had never seen on a market stall. They sold fountain pens and pocket watches (I was thinking of buying these). I remember the ‘golliwog’ coin bank, because it struck me as an unpleasant reminder of a racist era. I saw only those things I reacted to.

In my account of cognition (the Affective Context Model), affective responses (‘reactions’) are the golden thread that unite attentional, memory and decision-making systems - systems which are highly integrated (you may have noticed that I have deliberately blurred the seeing/remembering line to make this point).

The application to learning should be obvious: a lecture is much like our bric-a-brac stall: a participant will be exposed to all manner of items, but they will likely remember only those things that they react to.

Some of these reactions may be ‘push’ in nature - for example a shocking stunt performed by the lecturer (calculated to get a reaction). This is like the Russian pistols in the example above. Some reactions may be ‘pull’ - where a student is especially interested in something (like the pocket watches and fountain pens).

What does this mean for learning design? Without a detailed analysis of what each learner cares about (and therefore will react to) a learning session will be hugely inefficient, with learners only remembering a fraction of what they are exposed to in typical cases. To have much impact, instructors will need to fall back on increasingly dramatic stunts, examples, and histrionics.

Understand what people care about, or you are simply wasting your time.