What I really want to know is how fast “lucky” vs. “unlucky” people would have counted the photographs if there was irrelevant intentionally distracting text on the page, rather than relevant text. My hypothesis is that “lucky” people would take longer than “unlucky” people, because they were attending to something irrelevant to the task.
Note that this is not a logical requirement: brains have LOTS of parallel processing, so having more stimuli be considered salient does not necessarily equal more time spent attending to the page. The amount of extra time (if any) would depend on the degree of stimulus discrimination that can be applied outside of conscious awareness.
That is, the lower the false positive rate that subjects’ unconscious minds have in identifying opportunities for conscious attention and exploitation, the greater the tradeoff-free ROI.
Hence the ‘further study’ aspect. All I did was make a clear hypothesis that, if true, would indicate a further study or perhaps a direction in which we could direct ‘unlucky’ people in which they would be more successful than ‘lucky’ people.
Note that this is not a logical requirement: brains have LOTS of parallel processing, so having more stimuli be considered salient does not necessarily equal more time spent attending to the page. The amount of extra time (if any) would depend on the degree of stimulus discrimination that can be applied outside of conscious awareness.
That is, the lower the false positive rate that subjects’ unconscious minds have in identifying opportunities for conscious attention and exploitation, the greater the tradeoff-free ROI.
Hence the ‘further study’ aspect. All I did was make a clear hypothesis that, if true, would indicate a further study or perhaps a direction in which we could direct ‘unlucky’ people in which they would be more successful than ‘lucky’ people.