How well do you pay attention? (video test inside)

[UltraVires]

@Idle_Thoughts

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.

But the task you are asked to perform is “count the passes.” If I let my eyes focus on the other things, see a gorilla, and say to myself, “Wow, there is a gorilla!” then in those seconds, I am not paying attention to the very thing I was asked to do which is count the passes.

[Frylock]

@jtgain

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.

But most people do think it’s remarkable that they didn’t see it. YMV.

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.

It translates to eyewitness testimony because we have no idea what details the person was actually paying close attention to, and the witness is often not aware of the effects this attention has on their memories of what happened. In the gorilla scene, if we ask most people “was there a gorilla in the room,” they’ll answer with a very firm “no.” Most people won’t say “well I wasn’t paying attention to anything but how many times the ball was passed” because it wouldn’t even occur to them to think that paying attention to ball passing would make them miss something like that gorilla in that video. As the OP says, to many it even seems practically impossible for anyone to have missed that, even given the setup.

[Cat_Whisperer]

@robert_columbia

<snip> 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.

That’s where our remarkable pattern-recognition skills come in handy - we see, evaluate, and discard before we even consciously know we’ve seen something.

@Frylock

<snip>
It translates to eyewitness testimony because we have no idea what details the person was actually paying close attention to, and the witness is often not aware of the effects this attention has on their memories of what happened. In the gorilla scene, if we ask most people “was there a gorilla in the room,” they’ll answer with a very firm “no.” Most people won’t say “well I wasn’t paying attention to anything but how many times the ball was passed” because it wouldn’t even occur to them to think that paying attention to ball passing would make them miss something like that gorilla in that video. As the OP says, to many it even seems practically impossible for anyone to have missed that, even given the setup.

I do appreciate how well this illustrates that you don’t see or pay attention to or remember things that you could reasonably expect to have noticed. We truly have no idea what goes on between the sensory input that comes in through our senses and what our brain lets us (the consciousness riding this body) know.

[clairobscur]

@Joey_P

I think they need to make some new ones where it isn’t a gorilla.

There are others where something else than a gorilla appears. There’s one with the gorilla, but made with the expectation that many people will be aware of it hence including something equally outrageous (can’t remember what) besides the gorilla, that people don’t notice. There’sthis one, which is quite different in nature, too.

[TokyoBayer]

I was busy counting the passes, which I missed by one dammit!, when I suddenly noticed the gorilla in the middle, wondered what the hell it was doing there, and then didn’t notice it was gone.

I teach English as a second language, including to kindergarten kids, and you can really see how distracted they become by people coming and going.

[Novelty_Bobble]

@Roland_Orzabal

“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!”.

It isn’t a pass/fail thing though, it is merely an illustration of how fallible we all are.

If I described this task to you, start to finish, without you ever having seen it or knowing about it, how confident would you be that an average person would spot something as obvious as a gorilla? The fact that a majority of people don’t see it is a powerful and yet simple illustration of attention blindness and that is a critical point to understand if we are to understand the way people behave and why they sometimes do superficially stupid things.