Here's How to Quickly Find Lost Objects -- Really

Want to find your keys quicker?  Or, in my case, glasses that seem to disappear every morning and every night?  Write "keys" on a light switch you use every day.

Too simple?  In my house where things go missing all the time (probably because there are two very middle-aged people living there), a new study says that brain-sciences memory research at Washington University in St. Louis shows that where someone looks can be guided by their recent interactions with the environment.

Our visual world is cluttered, complex and confusing, newswise.com reports. “We can’t fully process everything in a scene, so we have to pick and choose the parts of the scene we want to process more fully,” says Richard Abrams, professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences. “That is what we call ‘attention.'"

So then, how do we choose which parts of a scene deserve our attention?

I probably know what it's like when you come home from work.  First you check your phone, then your laptop, then see if your kids are bleeding (just kidding -- I think).  How do we sot through all the information flying at us?

“We’re more likely to direct our attention to things that match objects that we’ve interacted with,” Abrams points out. The new research shows that this is the case even if they only match in meaning — not appearance, according to Abrams, the web site notes.

Previous research has shown that our attention is biased toward objects that share basic features — such as color — with something we have recently seen.

For example, finding your keys on a red key chain would be easier if you had previously reached for a red apple, compared to if you had chosen a yellow banana for your snack. This effect is called “priming.” This priming also occurs for items that are only conceptually related — the word “KEYS” doesn’t look like your keys, yet the facilitation still occurs.

And if we want to strengthen that bias? Perform an action while being primed with an image or, according to the newest research, with a word, and you’ll find your keys even faster.

“Things we act on are, by definition, ‘important’ because we’ve chosen to make an action,” Abrams explains. Making an action may produce a signal in the brain that what you’re seeing is more important than if you just observed it, passively.

“In order for us to behave efficiently in the world, we have to make good choices about which of the many objects in a scene we are going to be processing,” Abrams concludes. “These experiments reveal one mechanism that helps us make those choices.”