COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 7 “This is not to say that traditional religions are going away,” she says. “But, Disney is so powerful as a mythmaking company, that between the classic Disney films, Star Wars and Marvel, those have become more of a common language across the globe than some of these other traditions.” The Disney company is very well aware of this, and it encourages events like Lunar New Year celebrations at Disney World, complete with Mulan and the related merchandise, or Day of the Dead celebrations, she adds. Disney creates links between many different cultural and religious moments. Global calendars are now being celebrated by the Walt Disney Company, but people also celebrate by going to Disney. “When I talk about this, people say to me, ‘Well, religion is true. Religion was truly revealed by God, and Disney is made up by people.’ From an academic standpoint, I always say, ‘I can’t say if a religion is true or not. That’s above my pay grade. I study what people do.’ We know some things about the human history of religions, and the inspiration is up to people’s own faith,” she says. “We know about the human history of Disney, but the emotional reality for people is just as powerful. Is Disney a religion or not? There’s no real final answer to that. The emotional investments and way people make meaning of their own selves out of Disney is very, very strong.” PSYCHOLOGY ATTENTION CONTROL Controlling our attention is important as we go through our daily tasks. How are we able to direct our attention to information that matters and not be distracted? Which memory systems help support remembering our goals and avoiding distractors? Cognitive psychologist Nancy Carlisle addresses these questions about the relationship between attention and memory in humans, and her work sheds new light in countering long-held beliefs. Whereas most theories focus on our ability to guide our attention toward a goal, such as looking for silver things when we want to find our keys, recent evidence has shown that participants also use knowledge of distractors to improve finding goal objects. In research funded by the National Institutes of Health, Carlisle and her colleagues are examining the balance between enhancing targets and avoiding distractors, and they have found evidence that both can be used to enhance performance. We can set up our brain to guide attention toward goals, yet we can also set up our brain to ignore distractors if we have prior knowledge of what will distract us. “This knowledge that attention can also avoid is new,” says Carlisle, associate professor of psychology and cognitive science. “When people have information about their distractors, that can actually help them attend to their goal items. And it makes sense that we would want to avoid distractors when we really need to concentrate our attention, like when cellphone notifications keep coming through when we are trying to study.” In laboratory experiments, participants searched for a shapedefined target in a display containing items presented in two colors. “We either provide a cue that says, ‘Your target will be this color,’ which is the guide toward that color situation, or ‘Your target will NOT be this color,’ meaning avoid attention toward that color,” Carlisle says. “We find that both of those cases lead to faster reaction times than when you don’t have any information at all. Memory is playing a role in this. They get a cue before the search array comes on, so we also need to use our working memory system to hold on to this relevant information until we need to use it.” Understanding attention control might have practical applications treating medical conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “I think what we really need to do is start taking some of these ideas about how distractors fit into this broader system and incorporating them into our theories of attentional control,” Carlisle says. “Right now, we treat ADHD using medication, but if we understand better why people get distracted and which brain systems are involved, we could potentially create a training regime that would improve their attentional abilities.” JOHN CRAIG / THEISPOT.COM
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==