Orienting to see what’s important: Learn to ignore the irrelevant

Abstract

The current study used a triad judgment task to assess whether blocking by comparison type in a triad judgment task could lead people to pay less attention to surface-level (irrelevant) features and pay more attention to deep (structural) features of information. A sample of 313 participants recruited through Mechanical Turk participated in this study. On each triad, participants were asked to evaluate which of two source scenarios went best with the target scenario. Three types of triads were constructed with materials related to the ability to perceive ethical issues within the practice of psychology. One type of triad contrasted a scenario that was similar to the target in terms of surface-level features and a scenario that was similar in terms of deep features (similar surface-similar deep, SS/SD). A second triad type contrasted a scenario that was similar in terms of deep features with an unrelated scenario (similar deep-unrelated, SD/U). The third contrasted a scenario that was similar in terms of surface features with an unrelated scenario (similar surface-unrelated, SS/U). There were 10 triads of each type. We found that with all the blocking orders except two, participants reliably chose the SS scenario over the SD scenario for the SS/SD triads. However, participants who started out with the SD/U triads did not. The results provide evidence that people often have the ability to perceive the deep, but they are distracted by the surface-level features. The results also show that people can be oriented away from being distracted by the surface-level features so that they can see the deep.