mentale Prozesse

01Aufmerksamkeit

Definition

Aufmerksamkeit ist die Fähigkeit des Menschen, sich auf bestimmte Informationen zu konzentrieren, während andere Informationen ignoriert werden.

The conscious mind

The conscious mind can process a limited amount of information at any given moment, (approximately 120 bits per second). This constraint reflects how much detailed information we can actively handle simultaneously, such as focusing on a conversation, making a decision, or solving a problem.

Imagine your conscious mind as a small desk. You can only place a few pieces of paper (bits of information) on it at a time to work on. If too many papers pile up, the desk becomes cluttered, and you can't work effectively. Similarly, the conscious mind has a limited "workspace," while your unconscious mind handles much more in the background.

Three Understandable Examples

• Listening to Conversations

  Scenario: You’re at a party, and two people are talking to you at once.

  Relevance: Your conscious mind struggles to fully process both conversations simultaneously because understanding spoken words takes up a significant portion of those 120 bits per second. You can focus on one person but might miss details from the other.

• Multitasking While Driving

  Scenario: While driving, you’re trying to listen to the GPS, talk to a passenger, and notice traffic signs.

  Relevance: Driving requires a lot of conscious focus (e.g., processing road conditions, car movements), leaving little capacity for the other tasks. This is why multitasking while driving can lead to mistakes or accidents.

• Learning Something New

  Scenario: You're learning a new skill, like playing the piano.

  Relevance: At first, you consciously focus on pressing the right keys (120 bits being used!). As you practice, the task becomes automatic and moves into the unconscious mind, freeing up conscious capacity for other things.

The conscious mind’s 120 bits per second processing capacity is why:

Focus is crucial—too many simultaneous tasks overwhelm us.

Habits help automating tasks allows the unconscious mind to take over.

Prioritization matters-—we need to consciously decide what deserves our attention.

What is a bit?

A bit (short for "binary digit") is the smallest unit of information in computing and information theory.

A bit can represent two states, like yes/no, on/off, or 0/1.

When we talk about "bits per second," we’re referring to the rate at which information is processed, transmitted, or received.

What does 120 bits per second mean in this context?

In cognitive psychology, 120 bits per second is an estimate of how much conscious information the human brain can actively handle in a single second.

It’s not a measure of everything happening in the brain (the unconscious mind handles vastly more).

It quantifies what we can consciously focus on, such as processing words in a conversation or solving a math problem.

Related Examples of Measurements in Bits per Second

Internet Speed

When you hear about an internet connection of "100 Mbps" (megabits per second), it means your device can receive or transmit 100 million bits of data per second.

Example: Downloading a movie—higher bits per second = faster downloads.

Speech Processing

When listening to someone talk, speech contains about 60 bits per second of information on average.

This means the brain uses a significant portion of its conscious capacity to process a conversation.

Visual Information

The human visual system processes enormous amounts of data, but only about 10–12 bits per second of visual information reach the conscious mind.

Example: Looking at a complex image—your brain filters out most details, focusing only on what seems important.

Why Use Bits per Second?

Universality:

Bits are a universal way to measure information, whether it’s in psychology, technology, or communication.

They provide a standard for comparing different systems (e.g., human cognition vs. computers).

Capacity Limits:

Bits per second help define how much information a system can handle in real-time.

In humans, it quantifies how much conscious focus we can apply, while in computers or networks, it shows processing or transmission speed.

Efficiency:

Understanding bits per second helps optimize systems (e.g., designing apps to not overwhelm cognitive capacity).

Key Takeaways

120 bits/second is the human brain’s conscious bandwidth—a small workspace compared to the brain's overall processing power.

Related measures like internet speeds and speech rates also use bits per second to quantify how much information can be handled in a given time

Using this metric helps psychologists, neuroscientists, and technologists better understand and design for human or machine limits.

Does the Brain’s Information Capacity Vary During Learning?

Yes, studies suggest that the brain’s ability to process information in bits per second depends on:

• The type of learning task (e.g., declarative vs. procedural learning).
• The complexity of the information (e.g., abstract concepts vs. simple patterns).
• Cognitive load (how much effort is required to process and retain the information).

Research on Learning and Bits/Second

1. Cognitive Load Theory (CLT)
   • The theory describes how much information the working memory can handle at one time.
   • George Miller (1956): The famous "7 ± 2" rule estimates that humans can hold 7 pieces (chunks) of information in working memory, roughly translating to 50–70 bits per second for tasks like memorizing numbers or words.
2. Speech and Listening Studies
   • A normal conversation contains about 120–150 words per minute, which corresponds to 60–70 bits per second.
   • Studies show that learners struggle if they need to process speech faster than this rate.
3. Visual Learning
   • Research estimates that humans consciously process 10–12 bits per second of visual information, even though the retina collects far more data.
   • Example: Watching a video tutorial requires combining visual and auditory streams, potentially nearing the 120 bits per second threshold.
4. Multimodal Learning
   • Combining visual, auditory, and motor tasks (e.g., learning to play a musical instrument) increases the total processing load
   • While procedural aspects can bypass conscious limits over time (via practice), initial learning phases often overload the brain’s 120 bits/second capacity.

Why is this Relevant for Learning?

Understanding the brain’s bit-processing limits helps educators and designers create effective learning experiences:

1. Avoiding Overload
   • Too much information presented at once (exceeding ~120 bits/second) causes cognitive fatigue and poor retention.
   • Solution: Break content into small chunks or use spaced repetition.
2. Maximizing Engagement
   • Emotionally engaging material taps into additional brain resources and can bypass some conscious capacity limits.
3. Leveraging Procedural Learning
   • Repetitive practice moves tasks from conscious to unconscious processing, freeing up capacity for new material.

Future Research Directions

Advanced brain imaging techniques like fMRI and EEG are being used to estimate real-time brain activity during learning tasks.

Researchers are investigating how multitasking, emotional engagement, and stress influence the brain’s bits per second capacity during learning.

Is 120 Bits/Second a Hard Limit?

The "120 bits per second" estimate is widely accepted as a useful approximation for conscious processing, but the actual limit may vary:

Higher for simple tasks: E.g., memorizing numbers or repeating words.

Lower for complex, abstract tasks: E.g., solving math problems or understanding philosophical concepts.

UIUX: Recognition Rather than Recall Wiedererkennung statt Erinnerung

Das Abrufen von Elementen von Grund auf ist schwieriger als das Erkennen der richtigen Option in einer Liste von Auswahlmöglichkeiten, da der zusätzliche Kontext den Benutzern hilft, Informationen aus dem Gedächtnis abzurufen.

Psychologists like to make the distinction between two types of memory retrieval: recognition versus recall.

Think of meeting a person on the street. You can often tell quite easily if you have seen her before, but coming up with her name (if the person is familiar) is a lot harder. The first process is recognition (you recognize the person as familiar); the second involves recall.

Recognition refers to our ability to “recognize” an event or piece of information as being familiar, while recall designates the retrieval of related details from memory.

Activation of Content in Memory

Often psychologists think of memory as organized in chunks: basic interconnected units. Each chunk can be described by its activation: a measure of how easily that chunk can be retrieved from memory.

For example, your name is a chunk in memory; it has very high activation — if someone woke you up in the middle of the night and asked you what your name was, you’d be able to produce it fairly quickly. On the other hand, if you had to remember the name of your first-grade teacher, that answer would likely be harder to come up with: its activation is lower.

The activation of a chunk is influenced by three factors:

• Practice: how many times a chunk has been used in the past
• Recency: how recently a chunk has been used
• Context: what is present in the person’s focus of attention

Practice

Common lore says that practice makes perfect. Indeed, the more you practice a piece of information, the more likely you are to remember it: a chunk’s activation depends on the amount of practice that it has received. That’s part of the reason why your name is so much more familiar than that of your first-grade teacher: it has received a lot more practice.

Recency

But practice is not the only thing that influences activation: recency, or how far away in the past you’ve used a chunk, also dictates how well you remember information. In other words, something that you’ve used very recently has a higher activation than a piece of information that has not been used for a while (like the name of your first-grade teacher).

Context

Besides practice and recency, the third factor that affects activation is context. To understand what that means, we need to take a step back and talk about associations.

associations

In the beginning of this section, we said that chunks are interconnected memory units. The connection between two chunks is called association. If I say the word Paris and ask you what words come to mind when you hear it, you may come up with France, food, Eiffel Tower, or Napoleon. All these words are strongly associated with Paris, and, when Paris gets in the focus of attention (that is, you’ve just heard it or read it), it spreads activation to other chunks associated with it. The most active chunk in your memory is the one selected as your first response; the next most active chunk will be your second response, and so on. (Note that the associations between concepts are highly personal and depend on previous experience: a French person may have different associations with the word Paris than an American.)

The concept of association is tremendously important in psychology: it forms the basis of learning and problem solving. It allows us to have a relevant conversation and it helps us discover new things. Associations are the link between the present (the current context in which we are) and our previous experience and knowledge.

But how does context affect the retrieval of information from memory? It’s like Proust’s madeleine: when something in our current environment (the smell and taste of a cookie) is strongly associated with a chunk in our memory, it spreads activation to that chunk and it makes it become more active. The madeleine episode from Proust’s childhood (although buried in the depths of memory and having very low activation in the beginning) suddenly became stronger because of the cue in the current context that spread activation to it.

Recognition vs. Recall

The difference between recognition and recall is the number of cues that help memory retrieval; recall involves fewer cues than recognition.

Der Unterschied zwischen Erkennen und Abrufen besteht in der Anzahl der Hinweise, die das Abrufen des Gedächtnisses unterstützen; beim Abrufen sind weniger Hinweise erforderlich als beim Erkennen.

Answering a question such as Did Herman Melville write Moby Dick? involves recognition: you simply have to recognize whether the information provided is correct. If, instead, I asked you Who wrote Moby Dick? you would use a process of recall to retrieve the right answer from your memory.

Recognition is easier than recall because it involves more cues: all those cues spread activation to related information in memory, raise the answer’s activation, and make you more likely to pick it. It’s the reason why multiple-choice questions are easier than open-ended questions, where the respondent has to come up with an answer.

In our everyday life, we often use a combination of recognition and recall to retrieve information from memory. Often, we start with a piece of information that is easy to recall to narrow down our choices, and then we go through the resulting choices one by one and recognize the relevant one.

An example is how people navigate to a site they’ve visited before. Say you want to go to our site: if you’ve been here a lot, you might recall that it’s called nngroup.com, and get here quickly. But many people would be able to recall only some terms they associate with the site, such as maybe usability, user experience, or Nielsen. Luckily, entering such terms into a major search engine will bring up this website as one of the entries on the first page. This transforms your task into one of scanning the SERP (search-engine results page) and relying on recognition to pick out the desired website from among the other options listed. (In fact, a paper by Eytan Adar, Jaime Teevan, and Susan Dumais showed that this method of retracing the path to a previous page is the preferred method for revisiting content on the web.)

Search does require users to generate query terms from scratch — which most people are bad at — but from then on, users can rely on recognition while using the search results. This is one of the reasons search engines have become such an essential tool for using the web. Search suggestions are a major advance in search usability because they partly transform the query-generation task from one of recall to one of recognition.

Recall in User Interfaces

The classic example of recall in an interface is logging in. When you log in to a site, you must remember both a username (or email) and a password. You receive very few cues to help you with that memory retrieval: usually, just the site itself. Some people make it easier for themselves by using the same credentials everywhere on the web. Others create a password that is related to the site (e.g., amazonpassword for Amazon.com or buyshoes on zappos.com) so that they increase their ability to recall by making the site a stronger cue. And many others just keep their passwords somewhere on their computer, in a password manager, or on a piece of paper.

Recognition in User Interfaces

A menu system is the most classic example of a recognition-based user interface: the computer shows you the available commands, and you recognize the one you want.

Say, for example, that you’re working with a word processor and want to draw a line through a sentence to indicate that it's no longer valid. Before the advent of direct manipulation and graphical user interfaces, you would have had to recall the name of this rarely used formatting feature. A difficult and error-prone task. Now, however, you can look at the menu of formatting options and easily recognize the term Strikethrough as being the one you want.

Promote Recognition in User Interfaces

How do you promote recognition? By making information and interface functions visible and easily accessible.

Gestural interfaces also rely heavily on recall because they require users to remember the gestures that they can make in a given context. Tips, progressive disclosure, and good gestural signifiers are all cues meant to make the recall of the gesture easier. 

Many mobile apps start with tutorials that explain to users how they are supposed to use the apps. People are supposed to memorize that information and remember it when they need it. That’s not going to happen: tutorials have a lot of information, but they are not rehearsed much and users have little time to establish associations between the information in the tutorial and the actual interface. Instead of showing general tutorials, use contextual tips tailored to the page that the user is visiting. Those will allow the user to recognize which actions they may want to do and how.

Conclusion

How easily information can be retrieved from memory depends on how often we’ve encountered that information, how recently we’ve used it, and how much it is related to the current context. Richer contexts (like those present when we use recognition rather than recall) make memory retrieval easier. Interfaces that promote recognition give users extra help in remembering information, be it about tasks and items that they had seen before or about interface functionality.

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Minimize the user's memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another. Information required to use the design (e.g. field labels or menu items) should be visible or easily retrievable when needed.

Humans have limited short-term memories. Interfaces that promote recognition reduce the amount of cognitive effort required from users.

tip: Let people recognize information in the interface, rather than forcing them to remember (“recall”) it.

Offer help in context, instead of giving users a long tutorial to memorize.

Reduce the information that users have to remember.

Example ofthis Usability Heuristic:It’s easier for most people to recognize the capitals of countries, instead of having to remember them. People are more likely to correctly answer the question Is Lisbon the capital of Portugal? rather than What’s the capital of Portugal?