The evolution of attention

It’s not about designing alerts, but redesigning attention, resulting in 8 features capitalised by Duolingo.

The Duolingo owl, Duo, is none other than our modern canary in the gold mine of education, where he does many tricks to get you to learn a new skill (image source: Yeo)

“I Taut I Taw A Puddy-Tat”

That catchphrase felt familiar to a generation of kids who watched Looney Tunes back in the 1950s. The immediate character that comes to mind is a small yellow bird known as Tweety.

In the cartoon, a standard formula would apply:

1. Sylvester, the cat, wants to catch and eat Tweety, but some major obstacles stand in his way.
2. Tweety says his signature lines, “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!” and “I did! I did taw a puddy tat!”
3. Sylvester spends the entire film using progressively more elaborate schemes or devices to catch Tweety, but fails in the end.

Tweety Bird may have been the earliest symbol of an early warning indicator of danger from canaries with his signature line, ““I tawt I taw a puddy tat!” (image source: Looney Tunes)

Interestingly, what meant to be slapstick humour showed a powerful mechanism of getting the attention of the audience through a predictable signal. In this case, a catchphrase leads to the reward of a series of silly actions.

Spanish sailors discovered a variety of finch on the Canary islands. Later, these birds will be called “canaries” (image source: The Ghost Island of San Borondon; Public Domain)

Whether it was coincidental or not, the archetype of the yellow canary seems to draw strong human interest. As early as the 15th century, Spanish sailors discovered these birds on the Canary Islands. Monks subsequently turned the canary trade into a monopoly business for their singing before the Italian traders managed to break the code and extensively breed canaries for their colour.

Although the canary started out as a yellowish-green bird, its iconic yellow colour eventually became a popular mainstream choice as a pet. (image source: Singing Wings Aviary)

Originally, wild canaries came in three shades of colour: yellow, green, and black. Over the next 200 years, through various cross-breeding attempts with finches, similar to the dogs, the pure yellow Canary came to existence due to a good genetic mix of yellow lipochrome and colourant added to their diets. (At this…