"This phenomenon is referred to as selective attention, and a famous study designed by Simons and Chabris (1999) demonstrated it quite well. For their research, these scientists showed a video to student volunteers featuring players passing basketballs back and forth, one team in white t-shirts, and the other team in black t-shirts. The viewers were instructed to count the passes between players wearing the white t-shirts."
"Sounds simple, right? It was, except that at one point, in plain view, a person in a gorilla suit strolls through, even stopping to stare at the camera and beat its chest. Incredibly, about 50 percent of viewers never see the gorilla. They are too busy counting the passes. "Oh, this is silly. I would totally see the gorilla," you might be saying to yourself."
"There's still a gorilla, and we do spot it. However, in doing so, we miss a couple of other visual tricks he throws our way, because now we are so focused on finding the gorilla! Face it-we just don't see everything. Even for the most perspicacious of viewers, what we see depends in large part on what we expect to see."
Selective attention causes observers to miss salient events when concentration is directed elsewhere. In a study, participants counting passes among players in white t-shirts often failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. Approximately half of viewers missed the gorilla because they focused on the counting task. A follow-up showed that focusing on one expected anomaly can cause observers to overlook other unexpected events. Perception is shaped by task demands and expectations, so different witnesses can honestly remember the same event in markedly different ways.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]