How do you ruin King Kong for a cognitive psychologist?

Have him count the number of times the basketball is passed.

Wow, finally an esoteric quip I understand. Yay for useless undergrad degrees!

Heh. That’s a cute one.

Hahaha! What a jolly good laugh. I know I certainly enjoyed it, but would someone mind explaining this for those OTHER poor fools who do not understand.

Invisible gorilla test.

There actually was a point to this joke.
I was inspired by a report I heard on NPR yesterday morning. Apparently they did a “gorilla in the room” experiment on radiologists. They wanted to see if their concentration on looking for particular features of x-rays effectively blinded them to obvious problems that thwey weren’t concentrating on. So they doctored some x-rays so that they had a gorilla superimposed on them and asked the radiologists to look for cancerous nodules.
Okay, I made that up – they didn’t really put a pictuire of a gorilla on the x-ray. That would be stupid and too literal. They put other features on for them to miss.

Actually, I didn’t make it up. They superimposed a picture of a gorilla on the x-ray. See?:

According to the report, 83% of the radiologists missed the gorilla, which is worse than the 50% of the people watching the basketball videotape. I’d be skeptical, but when I glanced quickly over the picture while reading the article, I didn’t see it, either.
When I mentioned this to my wifde, Pepper Mill, who’s a Dental Assistant, she wasn’t vsurprised. She told me about a case wghere she looked over the shoulder of a doctor looking at a head x-ray of a patient with headaches, and asked him if it might be due to the four impacted wisdom teeth she saw on the x-ray. He hadn’t noticed them.

Regarding the original gorilla experiment – I’ve heard the old canard that if someone tells you not to think of a purple giraffe, you find it impossible not to. What if you repeated the gorilla experiment, only with a purple giraffe waloking through the scene – after you hsad told the subject not to think of a purple giraffe (then told them to count the basketball passings).

Would this be like the “unstoppable force meets irresistable object” of cognitive psychology testing?

bump

Damn! I’m beginning to think humans just have a hard time seeing gorillas? What if there are gorillas in this room right now?!!

Stop counting basketball passes and LOOK, then!

Gorillas in the midst, even?

Good lord, it took me 2 minutes to see the damn thing, and I’m looking for it.

It’s a good thing I’m not your doctor. I understand they need to be very fosse about these things.

Assuming the studies are over, will these films be recycled so they can get the silver back out of them?

“Well, THERE’S your problem – you’ve got a gorilla lodged in your lung.”

Very “fosse”? Are Doctors choreographrers?To be anthropoid experts they’d have to be Fossey.

They’re very adept at camouflage–stealth maneuvers are a key element of gorilla warfare.

You are awesome.

How would those radiologists have responded if the researchers had put a horse into the pictures? Would they have spotted those?

How would those radiologists have responded if the researchers had put a zebra into the pictures? Would they have spotted those?

They probably would have looked for unicorns.

If you want the animal spotted, you should probably go straight for a leopard.

Would they have spotted owls?

“Bad news I’m afraid Bob…your Gorilla has lung cancer.”

I remember reading an account by an umpire who was calling one of his first games. He didn’t want to make any mistakes so he was really focusing on whether or not the ball passed through the batter’s strike zone.

The first pitch was outside the zone so he called “Ball.”

The catcher turned around and said “What the hell are you talking about? That was a strike!”

The umpire wanted to make it clear he wasn’t going to allow players to challenge his calls, so he said, “I’m not going to argue about it. It was outside the strike zone and that’s that.”

The catcher said, “Maybe so but he swung at it.”