Please help with my homework I am struggling with. Thank you. Attention Several
ID: 3467884 • Letter: P
Question
Please help with my homework I am struggling with. Thank you. Attention Several years ago, some vehicle models were launched with HUDs. The speed, distance traveled, fuel level, and time was displayed over the windshield of the car instead of on a panel on the dashboard. Explain why this may have been a problem in terms of divided attention. Describe your thoughts on the pros and cons of this design. Related to attention many people may probably think they are aware of almost everything in their environment. Explain why this intuition is not correct. Describe change blindness and explain the effect of cultural differences on change blindness.
Explanation / Answer
The Head Up Display (HUD) of speed, distance traveled, fuel level, and time on the windshield of the car would distract the drivers focus on road. It would hinder the attention by dividing the focus. The pros of this design is that it would provide all the information regarding the vehicle without the need to look at dashboard on the windshield. The cons is that there's always the chance that drivers would miss the important critical information over the non-critical information due to attention divide, and this could pose threat to drivers and those on road. The warnings that would be missed and the attention divide are always dangerous.
In the surroundings around us, we daily fail to attend to many significant and insignificant changes despite that these changes have happened within the attention span of us. This is blindness to change or change blindness. We feel that we are attentive and are able to distinguish any slight change in the environment, but it is not so. Our brain do not attend to those changes that it feels are not important, and thus, it saves energy, and helps us to focus on things that are more important. The cultural difference in change blindness is that people from Eastern cultures tend to focus more on the background objects or scenarios and interpret informations than the central objects. Whereas, the individuals from Western cultures tend to focus on the center objects than the background. Hence, the people from Eastern cultures would miss important clues on the forefront, while the individuals from Western cultures would miss the happenings in the background.