How Do Humans Amazingly Find Coins on the Street?

Seoul National University Research Team Identifies Three Key Elements of Human Attention
Visual Features, Value Memory, and Motivational Attraction Drive Attention
Eye Movements Can Confirm Attention Focus
Applicable for Assessing Conditions in Dementia and Schizophrenia Patients

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] People often find coins or bills on the street with remarkable accuracy, even when walking absentmindedly while looking at their phones or wearing earphones. Why do they have such an ability?

Seoul National University announced on the 26th that a research team led by Professor Kim Hyung from the Department of Life Sciences has identified the cause of this human ability in a paper recently published in iScience, a sister journal of the international academic journal Cell. Through an eye movement-based cognitive-behavioral paradigm and cognitive-behavioral computer modeling, they confirmed the three key elements of human attention that make people focus on surrounding objects and clarified their functions.

The research team divided participants into groups with good objects that gave money when selected, bad objects that took away money, and meaningless objects that neither gave nor took money, and asked them to remember these objects. One day and 30 days after learning, the participants’ gaze on the objects was measured to assess attention ability based on memory of object value.

By analyzing memory ability through object gaze in the cognitive-behavioral paradigm and modeling the brain function with computer simulations, the team confirmed that the human brain has three elements of attention. Specifically, they discovered for the first time in the world that attention to a particular object is driven by ▲ the object’s inherent visual characteristics (physical salience), ▲ long-term memory of learned object value (reward salience), and ▲ motivation attracted to objects that previously had meaning, whether good or bad (motivational salience).

Notably, when participants forgot the value of objects after 30 days, they did not look at any object randomly but selectively focused on good objects and the bad objects that had previously taken money. This phenomenon was observed for the first time. This result means that although participants did not remember whether an object was good or bad, they paid attention to objects based on the memory that the objects had some prior significance. The research team analyzed these cognitive-behavioral results through computer learning simulations and revealed that this attention phenomenon after forgetting is the best strategy for relearning the forgotten object values. Furthermore, using human eye movements, it became possible not only to evaluate simple memory ability but also to predict which objects humans focus on and choose, enabling assessments of memory and cognitive functions. It also laid the foundation for easy evaluation of mental disorders such as dementia and schizophrenia. The knowledge of the existence and function of the three attention elements in learning, memory, and forgetting can also aid in developing artificial intelligence closer to humans.