Selecting Information

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If you’ve ever listened to testimony at a trial (or seen a trial on TV), you may have been struck by how one witness will remember the exact time of an accident or the color and make of the cars involved, while another will describe the scene and note the sequence of events. They both saw the same accident but selected different parts of it to remember. In any situation, we encounter a great deal of information, which we must sift through to determine what is important. In our speed-dating example, Adam takes in some of the information Irina provides: what she says, how she says it, what she looks like, and how she presents herself. But other information escapes his notice. For example, the next man Irina meets, Ben, might note that she has a warm smile and that she laughs easily (at his bad jokes, no less). Of course, it’s possible that Ben and Adam were exposed to different information: perhaps Irina was more comfortable with Ben. But often people can come to vastly different conclusions even under the exact same circumstances. This is because we each organize our perceptions in existing memory bases called schemas.