Expectation
When a person expects certain things to happen, he/she tends to block out other possibilities. This can lead to inattentional blindness. For example, person X is looking for their friend at a concert, and that person knows their friend (person Y) was wearing a yellow jacket. In order to find person Y, person X looks around for people wearing yellow. It is easier to pick a color out of the crowd than a person. However, if person Y took off the jacket, there is a chance person X could walk right past person Y and not notice because he/she was looking for the yellow jacket. Because of expectations, experts are more prone to inattentional blindness than beginners. An expert knows what to expect when certain situations arise. Therefore, that expert will know what to look for. This could cause that person to miss out on other important details that he/she may not have been looking for.
Read more about this topic: Cognitive Capture, Possible Causes
Famous quotes containing the word expectation:
“That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what has been done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman’s belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)