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Always losing things and never finding them? This is what you’re doing wrong, apparently

Keys on table
Those darned keys [Photo: Pexels]

You’re heading out of the house and do the routine check: wallet, phone, keys.

Only, there are no keys in your bag. In fact, when did you last even use them, or see them? You start running around the different rooms searching for them and retracing your steps, but to no avail.

According to a new study by the University of Aberdeen, we struggle to find the keys in this situation not because we’ve been hiding stuff in our sleep or absentmindedly put them in the fridge (why do we always look there?), but because we’re searching for things in totally the wrong way.

House
Look in cluttered spaces, not the clear ones [Photo: Pexels]

That is we search in uncluttered, easily-visible areas where objects usually stand out – and this isn’t the way to do it.

Asking 14 participants to find targets in two different visual scenarios, scientists used eye-tracking technology to see how it is we hunt for missing things.

Instead of just using our peripheral vision to search the ‘easiest’, clear areas, we obsess over them unproductively while we should actually be spending our time looking at cluttered, ‘difficult’ ones.

According to the study’s abstract, an error participants made was to: “make superfluous fixations, sacrificing speed for a perceived (but not actual) gain in response certainty”.

Clothes in pile
Could you have left them in a shoe? Anything’s possible [Photo: Pexels]

In other words, we focus on too much on where think is giving us new information, rather than what actually would.

“If you’re looking for your keys you should focus on the areas with the most clutter, because if they were somewhat more obvious, you would have found them by now,” Anna Maria Nowakowska, researcher at the University of Aberdeen, told Seeker.

She also said that the study suggests people “waste a great deal of time looking in locations that they already know don’t contain the thing they are looking for”.

We’d love to say we don’t do this but yes, yes we do. Every time.

Do you have any tricks for finding lost things? Tweet us at @YahooStyleUK.

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