I didn’t cheat - I counted 13 passes (so missed two) but I saw the “gorilla” well before the end of the video.
I thought huh, gorilla then stopped noticing it because I was trying to count the people in white shirts.
This is almost exactly what I did, but I think I stopped counting because absurdity makes me Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there.
That’s what happened to me, but I’m spoiled having seen the other videos. I didn’t even bother counting the passes knowing it wasn’t going to be the important question. It’s like going to a movie already knowing the twist and leaving the movie knowing all the hints leading up to it but disliking the movie because you weren’t actually paying attention to the plot.
I think they need to make some new ones where it isn’t a gorilla. Also, I’m curious how ‘real world’ this is. In the real world, whether you’re a cop or running a business, you’re not concentrating on a busy environment in a small (as in 6 inches) area while something so absurd happens that you don’t even notice it. Showing a cop interviewing a suspect while something happens in the background or ledger with something so off the wall you almost assume it’s normal might make more sense, though I understand what they’re doing.
I recall someone (here, I think) saying that during med school they were asked to look at a chest X-ray and diagnose it. The trick was that the X-ray was fine (or maybe it wasn’t I don’t remember), but the person had a hairline fracture in their arm…that’s what the students were supposed to notice. Forest for the trees and all that, as long as you’re got the X-ray, might as well look at the rest of it.
Holy shit. And I mean HOLY SHIT! I wasn’t even concerned with how many passes the white team made, and I still missed the moon-walking bear. That really confuses and concerns me!
Well, it’s a damn good thing you’re not a mountie. I mean, you missed it twice and you were expecting it the second time.
Can you go get a job at boarder patrol the next time I take a vacation in the Great White North so I can bring all that Codeine back that I hear you kind folks sell OTC.
And learning to focus on one part of the picture is a valuable skill. There are so many distractors in life that being able to concentrate on what you are supposed to be doing makes you able to get things done at all. When you are driving on the road, do you pay attention to slogans on t-shirts of people standing near the side of the road? Probably not, you know you need to focus on the road and driving. Just knowing that there is a person by the side of the road that doesn’t appear to be wearing an official government uniform (e.g. police) is probably as much as you can afford to concentrate on.
I remember back in driver’s ed they did something like that. They played a video of someone taking a drive (POV style) down a road on a nice sunny day. IIRC a few minor things happened. Stop lights, someone ran out in front of them, no big deal. At the end, the question was ‘What was the sign on the side of the road?’ and it was something silly like’ “Slow Down, Children Playing” (ha ha you missed it, you weren’t paying any attention at all, you’re probably gonna mow down a bus stop full of old ladies).
Yeah, I get that you have to pay attention to everything, but, sorry, not every single sign warrants enough attention that you have to keep in in mind 5 minutes later. Hell, most things, when you’re driving, need immediate attention and can be forgotten as soon as you drive past them. So some kid runs out into the road and you skid to a stop, the second you can safely pass that kid, whether the kid had on a vertically or horizontally stripped shirt really doesn’t matter anymore.
Bingo.
And there are more examples of prioritization in attention. If I’m sitting at a desk trying to work on something, it doesn’t matter what the person two cubes away is talking about on the phone. If I can’t push their conversation to the back of my perception, I won’t get any work done. What color tie was the big boss wearing on August 13? I don’t remember, but I would have noticed if it was sufficiently outrageous or unusual to be noteworthy. What was important was I recognized that everything looked like it was in place and that there weren’t, like, dead bodies on the floor or anything.
Or a gorilla walking though a basketball game.
It wasn’t a gorilla, it was someone in a gorilla costume. Maybe he was going to a furry convention or something.
The gorilla didn’t surprise me so much because I was expecting some kind of distraction to deliberately test my attention. I just thought it was supposed to be some kind of party or something. But I was wondering if the players in white were at some point going to pass the ball to the players in black to confuse me. I also was wondering if the S’s on the wall were going to be part of trick question, but that didn’t happen either.
Who says it’s not important? Isn’t the ideal to get the count and see the gorilla?
So what is the overall point that the test is trying to make? I didn’t notice the gorilla because I was solely focused on counting the passes (and I missed 2). What does that say about an observer who sees/didn’t see a gorilla?
It’s not intended to say anything about particular observers. It’s meant as an illustration of the way that seemingly obvious, non-ignoreable things can easily go unnoticed. From the experience, one might take away a “lesson” (if one is needed here) about how adamant one should be about one’s own memories of things, how much and in what way to trust eyewitness testimony, etc.
An even crazier experiment is the one in which a person is put in a room with twenty or so other people, all watching a film of, say, a train rolling along a track. Then an experimenter comes in asking everyone questions about the man on the horse and what he did. (There was no man on a horse in the film.) The twenty people all answer perfectly well as though a man on a horse was exactly what they’d seen–because they’re in on the thing. The one subject who’s not in on it is puzzled at first, but with a great deal of reliability starts talking as though he’d seen the horse too–and then amazingly, if you come back to him quite a while later (months or years) it becomes clear that he actually remembers the horse etc and doesn’t remember the train!
Again, stuff like this just goes to illustrate how our relationship to the world through our senses doesn’t work intuitively the way we often expect it to.
I saw the gorilla but only got 3 passes.
I was predicting a possible trick related to the “in white” part. I suspected that there might actually be more players “in white” than were obvious. Yes, I saw the players wearing white shirts, but I was looking for players who might be wearing dark shirts with white pants. Another theory I had was that it was a trick question and that “in white” also included white people, regardless of what color clothes they might be wearing.
I agree with the second part of your post, so I didn’t include it here. I only take issue with this part as I’m not sure it illustrates that certain things are easily unnoticed.
If the instructions said to simply watch the video, and I didn’t see the gorilla, I would agree. But the instructions said to count the number of passes by the players in white. So when I watch the video, I tune out everything but the players in white to count the passes.
I am not looking for a gorilla or anything else, so I don’t think it is remarkable to say that I didn’t see it.
This doesn’t translate to eyewitness testimony, IMHO. If I was watching what transpired in Ferguson, for example, my eyes would have been fixated on the encounter with Wilson and Brown. No, I would not have noticed what was going on outside of that. So to the extent this video is trying to prove that eyewitness testimony is unreliable because people don’t see things that they are not focused on, I think it fails.
When I watch things like this (I would liken it to a “watch the ball to figure out what cup it’s under” challenge, for example), I don’t tend to just focus on the one thing, though. If you’re just following the cup where the ball was last, it probably won’t be long before you lose track of.
I tend to keep my eyes backed up a little, from being focused on one thing, so that my vision encompasses all of the surrounding area too. I was able to count the number of passes while still having most of my outside vision on the scene as a whole, so when something new came in and changed that scene, my eyes noticed it.
I don’t know if any of that makes any sense when trying to put it into words, but it makes sense to me and, more importantly, it seems to work. Going back to the “find the ball” example, there was this game on a handheld system I had that had that and I trained my eyes to be looking at ALL THREE cups rather than just one. I found I could find the ball much easier by keeping my eyes just looking at all three cups in general, rather than just watching one and possibly losing track of it. When your eyes are encompassing all three of them, you never lose track of where the right cup goes.
Let me guess, this is that fucking moronic gorilla suit basketball video. Did I get it right? Not going to click the link — I got it right.
“Pay attention to a specific aspect of what I’m about to show you. The only reason you’re doing this at all is because I’m asking you to do it, and I’m telling you that this is the aspect of the task that I’m concerned with. Did you do it? Good! Now, did you notice this other occurrence entirely separate from the singular aspect I explicitly told you to pay attention to? No? HA, YOU’RE AN IDIOT!”
Yeah, great job. Here’s a cookie. And a comic. Enjoy.