IS HE STILL TALKING?

Earlier I mentioned a difficulty that arises when exploiting selection for action. That same problem also applies to pattern recognition. It is..



You've probably heard of experiments that demonstrate what happens to our perceptions when a stimulus is repeated in a regular fashion. For instance, a background sound that goes on and on and on and on -- after a while people cease to notice it’s there. If you wear a wristwatch, you don’t think about it unless you want to know the time. But I’ll bet when you first started wearing a watch you were very conscious of it for at least a day or so. Try it now. Take off your watch and put it on your other wrist... See? You had ceased to notice your watch because the novelty of sensation has diminished over time. That's habituation/satiation.

In the early days of DOS, people were not used to seeing flashing cursors embedded in text they were trying to read. Paper didn’t flash. For some time it was quite irritating, but eventually the cursor lost its novelty and our brains now ignore it. We became habituated to the flashing cursor.

With excessive and repeated exposure, we even become habituated to stimuli that we once found arousing. This is probably why we constantly seek novelty, or at least stronger stimuli. Old movies and television shows are mighty laid back compared to what we watch today. You’ve seen the exploding car quota for movies inflate from year to year. If you wish to engage and hold an audience, it's not enough to hit the same note over and over. If your strategy is to engage your audience by exploiting arousal, you must provide novelty -- more and better.