Inattention Blindness
Aug. 5th, 2008 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThere's a fascinating news article. Apparently a paper has appeared in Nature penned by, among others, Teller and James Randi, on how our awareness is a cobbled-together illusion of low-resolution perceptions combined with the both a shallow memory and our anticipatory mechanisms, good enough for us to survive wild beasts on the grassy plains of our evolutionary environment, but so flawed as to be easily exploitable by magicians and tricksters. (If you haven't watched-- and followed along with Keith Barry's "Brain Magic"-- at least watch the first four minutes of it.)
The article cites The Awareness Test, in which you are shown two teams of four people each, passing two basketballs back and forth. Your responsibility is to count the number of passes made by the team wearing white.
The trick, however, is that the task of watching and counting is so all-consuming of our attentional faculties that we fail to notice a guy dressed in a bear suit moonwalk through the entire scene. The researchers noted:
Well, now I have research backing me up: it's not what I was looking for, and so my mind doesn't have a pattern ready to recognize it. It's part of the blurry background, not part of my attentional space at that moment. Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research, by Stephen L. Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson & Susana Martinez-Conde.
The article cites The Awareness Test, in which you are shown two teams of four people each, passing two basketballs back and forth. Your responsibility is to count the number of passes made by the team wearing white.
The trick, however, is that the task of watching and counting is so all-consuming of our attentional faculties that we fail to notice a guy dressed in a bear suit moonwalk through the entire scene. The researchers noted:
In this situation no acute interruption or distraction was necessary, as the assigned task of counting passes was absorbing. Further, the observers had to keep their eyes on the scene at all times in order to accurately perform the task. Memmert showed, using eye-tracking recordings, that many observers did not notice the bear even when they were looking directly at it.I thought of this because I often miss details, and so does Yamaraashi-chan. One of Omaha's favorite refrains is "How could you not see it? You were looking right at it." And my response is usually something lame along the lines of, "It's not what I was looking for."
Well, now I have research backing me up: it's not what I was looking for, and so my mind doesn't have a pattern ready to recognize it. It's part of the blurry background, not part of my attentional space at that moment. Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research, by Stephen L. Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson & Susana Martinez-Conde.
