I agree. If the test was stated as “Count the number of passes by white shirt people and at the same time be aware of anything odd that may happen” then you could fault someone for missing the gorilla.
But being told to focus solely on one thing and being able to focus on it without being distracted is an asset.
Since apparently 85% of people are able to miss seeing the gorilla, doesn’t seem like a particularly unique asset.
What percentage of those count the right number of passes?
Your post reminds me of the fascinating roller-coaster ride of science that Radiolab takes listeners on in their episode titled The Bad Show wherein they dissect layers upon convoluted layers of the onion regarding justifications and rationalizations for the results of an often poorly cited and misunderstood study about subjecting other people to electrical shock, and whether or not the results instill misanthropy or faith in human kind.
I used this video TODAY in my Introductory Psychology class. My percentage was about 50/50, which is pretty high. It’s a pretty small class, though, and the premise is relatively well-known.
Except that if you try to focus that way, you’ll end up making a (fairly short) list of things to specifically concentrate on, and if you left something off your list, you’re in trouble. For instance, a driver might concentrate on other cars, and pedestrians, and shiny spots on the road that might be slippery. That’s three completely different things they’re focusing on, and that’s probably close to the limit of what most folks can manage. Throw in the bicyclist, and since it’s not on their list, they won’t see her. And the driver certainly isn’t focusing on noticing a mugger murdering someone by the side of the road, which really calls into question things like eyewitness testimony in criminal cases.
One thing I’ve wondered about this test since the first time I saw it… What happens if the initial instructions are to count the passes by the black team, instead? Does that make the gorilla (who is, after all, black) more noticeable?
Exactly, the driver is doing nothing wrong here at all and yet we might be outraged that they didn’t see the crime taking place under their nose. I mean, it was yards away, and it was a murder! how could you not see it? Well, for the same reason most people don’t see the gorilla.
I didn’t bother doing it because I knew what sort of thing would happen. I saw this before with a different twist. In it, there were people in yellow clothes, and someone walking around in a bee suit. I didn’t see that one.
I want to say we were counting the yellow shirted people, which would address Chronos’s comment, but I’m not sure. I’d think I’d remember what the other color was though if it were the color whose passes I was told to count.
15 and yeah, I saw the gorilla
I knew it was about the gorilla just by reading the title of the thread. I love attention blindness.
A couple of points:
The usual number of people that spot the gorilla is around half not 15%.
Psychologists at the University of Utah have come up with an explanation involving working memory:
*But the Utah study went further: Again analyzing only accurate pass counters, the gorilla was noticed by 67 percent of those with high working memory capacity but only by 36 percent of those with low working memory capacity.
In other words, “if you are on task and counting passes correctly, and you’re good at paying attention, you are twice as likely to notice the gorilla compared with people who are not as good at paying attention,” Watson says. “People who notice the gorilla are better able to focus their attention. They have a flexible focus in some sense.”
Put another way, they are better at multitasking.*
Interesting. I checked my records and I never had a single class with more than 25% spotting the gorilla. And this is with over 600 people in total, over 30 separate replications and >15 people doing it each time.
I tried to keep it blinded as much as possible but certainly some may have blabbed to others. Of course if anything, that would have increased the numbers spotting the gorilla.
The best reason I can think for the discrepancy is that I turned on the misdirection spiel quite heavily and perhaps the formal study presented it far more neutrally.
It wouldn’t surprise me if that had an effect as stage magicians rely on the same effect.
That doesn’t surprise me at all, and I’d be curious to know if there were something else contributing (I haven’t read the literature). Namely, when you “prime” people by saying, “Okay–we’re going to show you something, and you need to do such and such” – ie, perform on a test of sorts, that certain subjects will be so concerned about their performance on that test that it also serves to warp their normal cognitive processes. That is, they’re not just selectively focusing on the number of passes–they’re also fixated on simply “getting the right answer,” and that–in and of itself–effectively filters their perception. Couldn’t it be that those who don’t notice the gorilla are people for whom the psychological need to get the “right” answer outweighs everything else. They want most of all to be “good test subjects.”