Prediction: We're Really Good at This
lolfighter
Snark, Dire Join Date: 2003-04-20 Member: 15693Members
Snark, Dire Join Date: 2003-04-20 Member: 15693Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Focus</div>So I stumbled across <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/07/technology/20100607-distraction-filtering-demo.html?src=me&ref=general" target="_blank">this test</a> and for some reason decided to take it. My general impression while doing it was "hey this is pretty easy" and I wasn't particularly surprised to find that I had received a perfect score.
Here's my prediction: Any of you that take this test will perform pretty well overall. It's a fair assumption that all of us are gamers here, and we probably all play the kind of games that require quickly analysing a situation and reacting appropriately, at least some of the time. In other words, our hobby trains exactly the kind of skills that this test measures. Try it for yourself. If anybody has different/supplemental ideas why we score so highly, let's hear 'em. And if anybody scores low (come on, there's no shame in it...) let's hear why you think that happened. All homebrew amateur theories welcome.
Here's my prediction: Any of you that take this test will perform pretty well overall. It's a fair assumption that all of us are gamers here, and we probably all play the kind of games that require quickly analysing a situation and reacting appropriately, at least some of the time. In other words, our hobby trains exactly the kind of skills that this test measures. Try it for yourself. If anybody has different/supplemental ideas why we score so highly, let's hear 'em. And if anybody scores low (come on, there's no shame in it...) let's hear why you think that happened. All homebrew amateur theories welcome.
Comments
And that's with a cold...
Things that I think helped:
1) The color difference is nice and strong.
2) The blues easily fade into the white background, where the reds stand out
3) Never more than 2 reds, so remembering their positioning is fairly simple.
If you had to pay attention to the blues instead, or if there were more reds it would be a challenge I think.
I didn't even notice the blue rectangles, the red stands out completely.
edit: For the juggle task, however, I completely sucked. I got everything correct, however I was apparently very slow. It seems that this is a characteristic of multitaskers. However I barely have any additional time when switching tasks. I suppose that this is because I memorize both the letter and the number, rather than thinking "hey, I'm looking for a number right now, let's forget about the letter"
Also, I got completely distracted for one answer which brought up a 4.5s decision time into the average.
It does make sense because I do have terrible reaction time.
But yeah, maybe my reflexes just suck a bit. Took me a bit to get the hang of doing the test.
How the hell can anyone be distracted by the blue rectangles?
After the first 4 unscored tests I did not even seem them during the short flash.
Random guess:
Red offers a higher contrast to white than blue, allowing us to blend in blue more easily.
Thus if we were able to repeat the test, but switched blue and red everyone would perform more poorly, overall.
Edit: The juggle is also easy. But for some reason I have trouble to remember that odd numbers and vowels are on the same button. Somehow I tend to see vowels more closely related to even numbers than consonants ???
In juggle thing, I was 881 ms in switching, and 875 ms in repeating. The little "additional time" bar is so small I cant even hover over it to see what it says, altough I assume it would say 6 ms.
No idea how accurate I was, as I think I accidently pressed wrong button for numbers at times (why pair vowel with odd?!?), and I dont really know all the vowels :P.
Wait there is a graph for that? Heh seems I only answered wrong once, when I switched to a letter task.
It's easy to jump to that conclusion. Certainly my gut tells me the same thing. But guts are fickle things and should not be trusted. Remember what I wrote in the first post: We're all gamers here, and we're no strangers to action games which require and therefore train the EXACT skill set we're testing here. Our sample size is very small and far from representative, and thus makes for a poor statistic.
As for reactions I didn't do too well. I'm just gonna blame it on the buttons; I associate 'even' and 'vowels' together so I had to stop myself hitting left when it was even.
got distracted during number / letter though cause of some irl
I don't get it. are they saying multitaskers are worse at multitasking? you would think the people who are used to doing multiple tasks would be better at switching tasks. I suppose I should read the article, but I'm onto another task!
As for the juggle thing I call language barrier causing issues with speed so I'm not going to report my results, except for saying I was actually -201 ms on switching tasks. Lol.
100%.
Guess that means I'm not very focused right now!
On the second, I was really slow. 1808ms or something. Twice what the multi-taskers did. I kept getting confused by the number and letter switching sides and the odd/vowel thing screwed me up too. I agree it should have been even/vowel or even better, separate buttons.
carry the 2, divide by zero...
Yomi level is over 9000!!!!!!!