selective attention experiment gorilla

The Invisible Gorilla: A Classic Experiment in Perception

The invisible gorilla experiment

A couple of paragraphs above, we gave you the same instructions that Chabris and Simons gave to a group of student volunteers before doing the experiment.

When the participants finished watching the video, they were asked the following questions (answer them as well if you watched the video):

“Did you notice anything unusual while counting the passes?”
“Did you notice anything else besides the players?
“Or did you notice anyone other than the players?”
“Did you notice a gorilla?”

The last question was the one that surprised the volunteers of the invisible gorilla experiment the most. At least 58% of them. Whenever the experiment has been repeated, the percentage of surprise is more or less the same. Yes, there was a gorilla in the video, but more than half of the people didn’t notice it. Did you see it?

The reactions to what happened

The first time the invisible gorilla experiment was conducted, and all subsequent ones, most of those who participated and didn’t notice the presence of the gorilla were amazed at how clear it all was! It seemed impossible to them that they had overlooked something so obvious.

When they’re asked to watch the video again, they all see the gorilla without a problem. Some think that they’ve been shown two different videos, but, of course, this isn’t the case. This experiment won the Ig Nobel Prize. This is an award given to those scientific activities that “first make you laugh and then make you think”.

Why are so many people blind to such an obvious image in the video? That’s the big question that comes out of this. It’s also striking that so many people refuse to accept that their eyes and perception are deceiving them. They think they’re seeing everything correctly, and yet they haven’t seen something so obvious.

If you're here, you probably already know a bit about the Invisible Gorilla video and how it relates to attention. Did you know this experiment supports a fascinating concept called "inattentional blindness?"

What Is The Invisible Gorilla Experiment?

In 1999, Chris Chabris and Dan Simons conducted an experiment known as the “Invisible Gorilla Experiment.” They told participants they would watch a video of people passing around basketballs. In the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked through the circle momentarily.

The researchers asked participants if they would see the gorilla. Of course, they would, right? Not so fast. Before the researchers asked participants to watch the video, they asked them to count how many times people in the white shirts passed the basketball. In this initial experiment, 50% of the participants failed to see the gorilla!

The Invisible Gorilla and Inattentional Blindness

This case supports the existence of inattentional blindness (also known as perceptual blindness.) Chabris and Simons describe the research into this phenomenon in their 2010 book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us . The book also describes the serious effect inattentional blindness can have on court cases, our perception of ourselves, and even life and death.

We don’t think that we fail to notice things. After all, if we fail to notice something...we go about our day without noticing that we didn’t notice something. The gorilla experiment shakes this idea up and often makes people uncomfortable.

What is Inattentional Blindness?

Inattentional blindness is a type of blindness that has nothing to do with your ability to see. It has to do with your ability to pay attention to unexpected stimuli. If your capacity is limited to one task or set of stimuli, you may fail to see the unexpected stimuli, even if it’s right in front of you.

Chabris and Simons were not the first psychologists to research this phenomenon. Arien Mack and Irvin Rock coined the term “inattentional blindness” in 1992 and published a book on the phenomenon six years later.

No one expects to see a gorilla walk into a group of people throwing basketballs at each other. (In a similar experiment, Chabris and Simons replaced the gorilla suit with a person carrying an umbrella - inattentional blindness still occurred.) So many people, while focused on a task, don’t.

This experiment shows that sometimes, we literally can’t see things that are right in front of us. Throughout their book, Chabris and Simons discuss the flip side of this. We believe that we see the people passing the basketball.

Inattentional blindness is slightly different than change blindness , which is a type of "blindness" that occurs when we fail to see changes in our environment.

Our memories can be tricky, especially when asked to recall them. We may also believe that we saw or experienced things that have never actually occurred. Both situations can play a role in, for example, the justice system.

Can Multitasking Cause Inattentional Blindness?

Not really; it's closer to the opposite! A Reddit user recently posted that people with ADHD are more likely to see the gorilla, supporting the idea that "focus" is what "blinds" people from the gorilla.

Kenny Conley and Inattentional Blindness

During their research, Chabris and Simons met with Kenny Conley. Conley was a member of the Boston Police Department in 1995. One night, he was chasing a shooting suspect. At the same time, another officer (Michael Cox) was chasing suspects - the officer was undercover, but he was mistaken for one of the suspects. Multiple officers began to assault Cox to the point where Cox was unconscious.

The incident went to trial. Conley was put on the witness stand, for he had been present at the scene of the assault of Michael Cox. But there was just one problem. Conley swore he did not see the assault happen. In his testimony, he says, “I think I would have seen that.” (Sounds much like what people would say after failing to see the gorilla, right?)

Law enforcement officers believed that Conley was lying on the stand. While the officers who assaulted Cox walked free, Conley was charged and put in jail for obstruction of justice and perjury.

But Conley wasn’t lying. He was just so focused on chasing the shooting suspect that he was blind to the assault of Michael Cox. It took ten years of appealing the conviction for Conley to walk free. He was eventually reinstated to his position at the Boston Police Department and received compensation for lost wages.

But Conley’s case is not the only known case of inattentional blindness. Research shows that misidentifications and inattentional blindness are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in this country. The Innocence Project claims that seven out of ten convictions overturned with DNA evidence could be attributed to eyewitness misidentifications. Just this year (2019), the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Curtis Flowers, a man who was accused of killing four people in 1996. Quite a few examples of witness misidentification are present in the history of this case.

Multiple studies have looked specifically at the abilities of eyewitnesses to thefts and other crimes. Turns out, these witnesses are not always reliable . Due to these studies and the conversation about inattentional blindness, multiple states have created policies for juries on how to spot possible witness misidentification and not to rely too heavily on eyewitness testimony.

Inattentional Blindness In Everyday Life

Even if you are not involved in a criminal trial, it’s important to know about inattentional blindness and how it affects our “intuition.” I highly recommend reading The Invisible Gorilla to learn more about inattentional blindness and how it pervades everyday life.

Inattentional Blindness (Definition + Examples)
Change Blindness (Definition + Examples)
Attention (Psychology Theories)
Dream of Gorilla Meaning (11 Reasons + Interpretation)
Cognitive Psychology

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Selective Attention/ Invisible Gorilla Experiment: See Through Your Focus

Introduction

You decide to see the latest thriller with your younger brother. You purchase your tickets, snacks, and drinks. All that’s left is to secure your seats. When you enter the theater, you scan the rows, looking for the perfect spot. Lo and behold, you find one: two open seats in the middle. You’re about to walk towards them when someone calls your name.

You trace the noise back two rows and see Jackie, a girl from your science class. She’s waving both her arms enthusiastically. When your eyes meet, she smiles and calls out, “Hello!” You wave back. How did you fail to spot her?

Your selective attention led to an episode of inattentional blindness. Your focus was on finding a seat, so you didn’t notice Jackie even though she was clearly visible.

Definition/Selective Attention

Selective attention is the process of focusing on a particular stimulus or stimuli, which results in the ignoring of other simultaneously occurring stimuli. Because your attention has already reached its limit, inattentional blindness can occur. You can fail to see something fully visible but unexpected - like a classmate at the movie theater - because your focus is on something else - like finding a seat. This phenomenon was famously recorded by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in their “invisible gorilla” awareness test.

The study was conducted in 1999 at Harvard University. It involved a short video of people in white t-shirts and black t-shirts passing a basketball to people in the same colored shirt. Participants were asked to watch this video and count the number of passes the white team made. Most could correctly list the number of passes and thought it was a relatively easy task. Yet despite this, over half of the participants failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walk between the basketball players, stand and face the camera, bang their chest, and walk offscreen.

This goes against nearly everyone’s intuition: we’d expect to be able to spot such an obvious occurrence. Yet repeated studies have gathered similar results: we aren’t as observant as we like to think. If we don’t expect to see something, odds are we won’t notice it. Selective attention has its benefits, but it can cause you to miss out on something as obvious as a gorilla thumping its chest.

Participants didn’t suffer when they failed to spot a gorilla while counting passes, but the consequences of selective attention can be far reaching and dangerous. Similar studies to the Invisible Gorilla Test have been replicated with experts and they faired only slightly better than the participants in the original study did. When looking closely at lung scans for signs of cancer, most radiologists did not see the superimposed picture of a gorilla until it was pointed out to them. If they failed to notice something as out of place as a gorilla, it stands to reason that even experts can be blind to medical anomalies or early warning signs of illnesses.

A much more commonplace example stems from the false belief that there’s such a thing as true, effective multitasking. For example, while you might never text and drive, you may on occasion answer a phone call while you commute. “It’s not like I’m taking my eyes off the road,” you may argue, “I should be able to listen and look at the same time.” However, vision has little to do with the problem of inattentional blindness. In fact, of the participants who failed to spot the gorilla, many of them looked directly at it. So even though you’re looking at the road, that doesn’t mean you can keep track of every detail you see. Your attention is still being divided, leaving you in danger of inattentional blindness, such as not seeing a motorcycle switch into your lane.

It’s impossible to be paying attention to everything at all times, so there isn’t an easy fix for selective attention. Rather, the remedy lies in acknowledging its existence and making informed decisions based on this truth. For example, since you know you can’t focus on both driving and your phone call, you make the decision to turn your phone on silent when you drive or leave it in the backseat. You make the choice to place your attention on the road rather than trying to multitask. Selective attention can even be beneficial if you’re placing your focus on the correct task. While you won’t notice if your phone lights up with new messages in the back seat, you will notice the car in front of you slowing down. Selective attention is useful, so long as you remember its limits.

Think Further

Recall a time when you were so focused on your task, you failed to notice a change in your environment. What were you doing? What did you fail to notice?
What are some other dangers of selective attention and inattentional blindness?
What are some other benefits of selective attention?

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'Invisible Gorilla' Test Shows How Little We Notice

A dumbfounding study roughly a decade ago that many now find hard to believe revealed that if people are asked to focus on a video of other people passing basketballs, about half of watchers missed a person in a gorilla suit walking in and out of the scene thumping its chest.

Now research delving further into this effect shows that people who know that such a surprising event is likely to occur are no better at noticing other unforeseen events — and may even be worse at noticing them — than others who aren't expecting the unexpected.

The so-called "invisible gorilla" test had volunteers watching a video where two groups of people — some dressed in white, some in black — are passing basketballs around. The volunteers were asked to count the passes among players dressed in white while ignoring the passes of those in black. (To watch the video for yourself, click here .)

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These confounding findings from cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris detailed in a 1999 study revealed how people can focus so hard on something that they become blind to the unexpected, even when staring right at it. When one develops "inattentional blindness," as this effect is called, it becomes easy to miss details when one is not looking out for them.

"Although people do still try to rationalize why they missed the gorilla, it's hard to explain such a failure of awareness without confronting the possibility that we are aware of far less of our world than we think," Simons told LiveScience.

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Gorilla infamy

Of course, these results are utterly counterintuitive, with 90 percent of people now predicting that they would notice the gorilla in the video. The problem is that this video has become so famous that many people know to look for a gorilla when asked to count basketball passes.

In new research, Simons decided to use the infamy of the invisible gorilla to his advantage, creating a similar video that asked for the same results from the audience.

"I thought it would be fun to see if I could monkey with people's intuitions again using almost the same task," Simons said.

(Stop now! Before reading further, try his test out here .)

The idea with this new video was to see if those who knew about the invisible gorilla beforehand would be more or less likely to notice other unexpected events in the same video.

"You can make two competing predictions," Simons said. "Knowing about the invisible gorilla might increase your chances of noticing other unexpected events because you know that the task tests whether people spot unexpected events. You might look for other events because you know that the experimenter is up to something." Alternatively, "knowing about the gorilla might lead viewers to look for gorillas exclusively, and when they find one, they might fail to notice anything else out of the ordinary."

Expecting the unexpected

Of the 41 volunteers Simon tested who had never seen or heard about the old video, a little less than half missed the gorilla in the new video, much like what happened in the old experiments. The 23 volunteers he tested who knew about the original gorilla video all spotted the fake ape in the new experiment.

However, knowing about the gorilla beforehand did not improve their chances of detecting other unexpected events. Only 17 percent of those who were familiar with the old video noticed one or both of the other unexpected events in the new video. In comparison, 29 percent of those who knew nothing of the old video spotted one of the other unexpected events in the new video.

"This demonstration is much like a good magic trick in which a magician repeatedly makes a ball disappear," Simons said. "A magician can lead the audience to think he's going to make the ball disappear with one method, and while people watch for that technique, he uses a different one. In both cases, the effect capitalizes on what people expect to see, and both demonstrate that we often miss what we don't expect to see."

"A lot of people seem to take the message of our original gorilla study to be that people don't pay enough attention to what is happening around them, and that by paying more attention and 'expecting the unexpected,' we will be able to notice anything important," he added. "The new experiment shows that even when people know that they are doing a task in which an unexpected thing might happen, that doesn't suddenly help them notice other unexpected things."

Once people find the first thing they're looking for, "they often don't notice other things," Simons said. "Our intuitions about what we will and won't notice are often mistaken."

Simons detailed his new findings online July 12 in the journal i-Perception.

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Bet You Didn't Notice 'The Invisible Gorilla'

The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons explores how we notice a lot less than we think we do. hide caption

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons Hardcover, 320 pages Crown List price: $27.00

Read An Excerpt

If you're intensely watching a ball game, and a gorilla walks onto the court, you'd notice him ... right? Believe it or not, there's actually a 50 percent chance you'd miss him entirely.

In their new book The Invisible Gorilla , Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons explain how our brains trick us into thinking we see and know far more than we actually do.

The phrase, "the invisible gorilla," comes from an experiment created 10 years ago to test selective attention. In it, study participants are asked to watch a video in which two teams, one in black shirts and one in white shirts, are passing a ball. The participants are told to count how many times the players in white shirts pass the ball.

Mid-way through the video, a gorilla walks through the game, stands in the middle, pounds his chest, then exits.

Then, study participants are asked, "But did you see the gorilla?" More than half the time, subjects miss the gorilla entirely. More than that, even after the participants are told about the gorilla, they're certain they couldn't have missed it.

"Our intuition is that we will notice something that's that visible, that's that distinctive," explains Simons, "and that intuition is consistently wrong."

Follow-ups to the gorilla study confirmed the findings. "There are sort of whole categories of intuitions, which are not really to be relied on, and that you can go seriously astray by relying on," says Chabris.

"It's true that the kinds of faculties that our minds are filled with right now are very good at solving particular problems that they're designed by evolution to solve," Chabris allows. But today's world is a lot different from the world in which our minds evolved.

Things move much faster now, for example. "When our visual systems evolved, and when our capacities for attention evolved, we didn't move at 60 mph. down highways," so developing brains didn't need to be able to notice a lot of unexpected things approaching at high speeds.

Likewise, Chabris says, "our faculties for making decisions were able to rely on anecdotes and stories, when that was the only information that was available to us." Now that we have statistical studies and databases and all kinds of other information, we aren't as good at making sense of and using information as a guide in our decisions.

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Attention’s Blind Spot: The Impact of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment by Chabris and Simons

By jackson hartley, this article is divided into the following sections:.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment, conducted by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in 1999, fundamentally altered our understanding of attention and perception. This pioneering research explored how focused attention can cause individuals to overlook unexpected events in their environment.

By examining the methodology, findings, and implications of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment, we can gain crucial insights into the limitations of human perception, cognitive psychology, and real-world applications.

Methodology and Design

Chabris and Simons designed the Invisible Gorilla Experiment to investigate the phenomenon known as “inattentional blindness,” where individuals fail to notice unexpected stimuli when their attention is directed elsewhere. The study involved participants watching a short video in which two teams—one dressed in white and the other in black—passed a basketball among themselves. Participants were instructed to count the number of passes made by the team in white, thereby focusing their attention on this specific task.

During the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the middle of the scene, thumped their chest, and then exited after a few seconds. The unexpected appearance of the “invisible gorilla” was intended to test whether participants would notice it while concentrating on counting the basketball passes.

This experimental design allowed Chabris and Simons to measure the extent to which focused attention impacts the perception of unexpected events, providing empirical data on inattentional blindness.

Key Findings

The results of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment were both revealing and transformative for cognitive psychology. Chabris and Simons found that approximately half of the participants failed to notice the gorilla despite its conspicuous presence. These findings highlighted the significant limitations of human attention and the ease with which individuals can overlook even highly salient stimuli when focused on a specific task.

These results underscored the concept of inattentional blindness, demonstrating that focused attention can create a cognitive tunnel vision where unexpected elements in the environment go unnoticed. The research challenged the assumption that humans have a comprehensive awareness of their surroundings and revealed the selective nature of attention.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment provided compelling evidence that our perceptual system is not as infallible as we might believe. It emphasized the importance of understanding the limitations of attention and perception, particularly in situations requiring heightened awareness and vigilance.

Psychological Mechanisms and Implications

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment illuminated several psychological mechanisms underlying inattentional blindness and selective attention. One key factor is the role of cognitive load, where the mental effort required to perform a task can limit the capacity to process additional information. When individuals focus intently on a specific task, their cognitive resources are allocated primarily to that task, reducing their ability to perceive other stimuli.

Another important mechanism is the concept of expectations and mental schemas, which shape what individuals pay attention to and what they ignore. In the case of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment, participants’ expectation to count basketball passes created a mental schema that filtered out irrelevant information, including the unexpected appearance of the gorilla.

These insights have profound implications for understanding the limitations of human perception and cognition. The findings emphasize the need for awareness of inattentional blindness in various contexts, from daily activities to high-stakes environments like driving and security monitoring. They also highlight the importance of designing systems and protocols that account for these perceptual limitations to enhance safety and performance.

Ethical Considerations

While the Invisible Gorilla Experiment provided valuable insights into attention and perception, it also raised ethical considerations related to the potential psychological impact on participants. The experiment involved deceiving participants about the true nature of the study, raising questions about the potential distress or discomfort caused by realizing their oversight.

Modern ethical standards prioritize minimizing harm and ensuring the welfare of research participants. Researchers must obtain informed consent, provide thorough debriefing, and ensure that any induced behaviors do not have adverse long-term effects. The ethical considerations surrounding the Invisible Gorilla Experiment have contributed to the development of stricter guidelines to protect participants while advancing scientific knowledge.

Broader Societal Impact

The insights gained from the Invisible Gorilla Experiment have significant implications for various fields, including psychology, education, workplace safety, and public policy. Understanding the limitations of attention can inform strategies to improve awareness, reduce errors, and enhance performance in different settings.

In psychology, recognizing the phenomenon of inattentional blindness underscores the need for further research on the factors influencing attention and perception. Psychologists can use this knowledge to develop interventions and training programs that help individuals improve their attentional skills and reduce the likelihood of overlooking critical information.

In education, the findings highlight the importance of teaching methods that take into account the limitations of attention. Educators can create learning environments that minimize cognitive overload and promote effective attention management, enhancing students’ ability to absorb and retain information.

In workplace safety, the insights from the Invisible Gorilla Experiment emphasize the need for protocols and systems that account for inattentional blindness. Employers can use this knowledge to design work environments and procedures that reduce the risk of accidents and errors, fostering a safer and more productive workplace.

In public policy, understanding the limitations of human perception can inform the development of regulations and guidelines that enhance safety and effectiveness in various sectors, from transportation to healthcare. Policymakers can use this knowledge to create policies that mitigate the impact of inattentional blindness and promote greater awareness and vigilance.

Theoretical Contributions

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment has made significant contributions to psychological theories, particularly in understanding attention and perception. It provided empirical support for the concept of inattentional blindness and highlighted the impact of focused attention on the ability to perceive unexpected stimuli.

The research also contributed to the broader discourse on cognitive psychology, emphasizing the importance of considering the limitations of human perception in theoretical frameworks and practical applications. By elucidating the mechanisms underlying inattentional blindness, the Invisible Gorilla Experiment has informed research on attention, perception, and the reliability of human observation.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons remains a cornerstone in the study of attention and perception. Through innovative design and rigorous methodology, the experiment revealed the significant limitations of human attention and the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, challenging the traditional view of perception as all-encompassing.

As we reflect on the legacy of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment, its lessons continue to resonate in various fields, from psychology to education to workplace safety. The research highlights the importance of understanding the limitations of attention and designing systems and protocols that account for these perceptual constraints. It underscores the significance of thoughtful and ethical approaches to studying and addressing the complexities of human cognition.

The enduring relevance of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment attests to its significance in the ever-evolving field of psychology. Its contributions to our understanding of attention and perception provide valuable guidance for creating conditions that promote greater awareness and reduce the impact of inattentional blindness. Ultimately, the Invisible Gorilla Experiment serves as a powerful reminder of the intricate interplay between attention, perception, and human experience.

Attention's Blind Spot: The Impact of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment by Chabris and Simons

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Inattentional Blindness: The Invisible Gorilla Test

Properly distracted, it’s easy to be fooled and not see what is right before your eyes.

Inattentional blindness, or perceptual blindness, sometimes called inattentive blindness. Inattentional blindness results from a lack of attention that is not due to vision or cognitive defects or deficits.

A temporary “blindness” can occur when it’s impossible to process all of the stimuli in certain situations. Inattentional blindness happens when people fail to see unexpected, but often conspicuous, things – like a person in a gorilla suit, researchers have shown.

The term “inattentional blindness” was coined by researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992. It became the title of their book of the same name, published by MIT Press in 1998. Interestingly, the phenomenon was identified just as new technologies such as cell phones and the Internet began to dominate modern life.

Inattentional blindness and several related phenomenon were around long before it was scientifically documented and described. These are kinds of things behind the work of master illusionists and sleight of hand artists like the late great Ricky Jay or Penn and Teller. What modern “magicians” do isn’t magic. It’s fooling your senses, your eyes, your brain, to create dazzling, baffling effects by distracting you attention.

There are several related types of what is known as “visual awareness failure” including change blindness , repetition blindness , visual masking , and attentional blink

What makes inattentional blindness different from these other phenomenon is the unseen object or stimulus is unexpected.

Of course, no one reading this has ever used their mobile phone while driving. If you ever do something like that, you put yourself at risk for inattentional blindness. (‘Why are the people behind me honking?’ ‘Where’d that stopped car come from?’ ‘Why did I just rear-end that car that wasn’t stopped a second ago?’ ‘Why to Tesla drivers drive so badly?’)

If you are old enough to remember the before times – before the internet, social media and streaming technology-enabled binge TV watching – you may have some inkling of the mass effect that inattentional blindness is having on a significant portion of humanity.

No business, political party or manipulative government would EVER want you to focus on a meaningless activity while doing something like marching a super unqualified, narcissistic, pathological liar candidate for president right in front of your face. Or selling and your children cigarettes while saying they’re good for you, covering the planet in life-exterminating carbon dioxide for profit or invading a neighboring nation and killing tens of thousands of people on the flimsiest of pretenses.

Is it really possible for a person dressed in a gorilla suit to walk through the middle of a group of people passing a basketball, beat its chest, and walk out of the picture without you ever noticing?

Inattentional blindness revealed: The Invisible Gorilla Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_suit#/media/File:Gorilla_suit_1.jpg CC BY 2.0

The Invisible Gorilla Test, also known as a selective attention test, is the most well-known study demonstrating inattentional blindness.

Conducted by Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, the study asked participants to watch a short video of six people – three in white t-shirts and three in black t-shirts – passing basketballs back and forth. Participants were told to keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people wearing white shirts. After a few seconds, a person in a gorilla suit strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and beats its chest, and then exits the frame. The person in the gorilla suit is on screen for about nine seconds.

Would you see the gorilla? Simons and Chabris found that 50 percent of participants did NOT see the gorilla. That percentage declined further when people were asked to make more demanding counts, such as the number of direct passes and the number of bounce passes.

British television used the basis of the study for a public safety advertisement, replacing the gorilla with a moonwalking bear, to show the potential dangers to cyclists caused by motorists’ inattentional blindness.

Take The Invisible Gorilla Test:

When I first took the test, I knew the gorilla was coming. People who originally participated in the test were not told something would appear during the middle of the video. Despite knowing the gorilla would appear, I did not see it look at the camera and beat its chest. I only saw the gorilla enter the frame and leave the other side.

Once I viewed the video again it seemed impossible to not see the person in the gorilla suit.

Subsequent experiments using shapes presented on computer screens showed inattentional blindness is most likely to occur if the unexpected stimuli resemble the environment. Participants in the experiment were told to watch only the black objects and ignore the white objects on a screen, or vice versa. After several viewings, a red cross unexpectedly appeared, traveled across the display and was on screen for five seconds. About a third of participants missed the red cross despite the fact its color and shape were different from the black and white objects. https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/blindness

An experiment using a brightly colored clown on a unicycle showed how cell phones contributed to inattentional blindness in basic tasks such as walking. People talking on cell phones were least likely to notice the clown. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1638

You do not talk about Fight Club if you do not notice Fight Club. A real world case of inattentional blindness played out in what became a long-running scandal involving the Boston police department.

On 25 January 1995 at 2 AM in Boston, a police radio call went out that an officer had been shot and four African American suspects fled in car. Boston police officer Kenny Conley was chasing a shooting suspect who climbed over a chain-link fence.

Undercover Boston police Michael Cox, who was working the department’s gang unit and was African American, arrived on the scene moments earlier. Other police officers mistook Cox for a suspect, according to the 2009 book The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide , by former Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr.

As police sometimes do if they catch fleeing suspects alleged to a shot a police officer, the four other officers savagely beat officer Cox, causing severe kidney damage and a brain injury, according to an account of the incident on National Registry of Exonerations website.

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3120

Meanwhile, Conley followed the suspect over the fence, eventually apprehending him.

When the officers beating Cox realized he was a police officer, they left him bleeding on the sidewalk and failed to report the incident. Officer Cox’s beating at the hands of fellow police officers exploded into a major scandal and criminal case, as documented in The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide .

In a trial related to Cox’s beating, Conley testified that he ran right past the place where Cox was under attack. Conley claimed not to have seen the incident.

The case was considered the worst known case of police brutality in Boston history, and to make it worse it was police-on-police brutality, according to The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide .

Investigators, prosecutors, and jurors in the case didn’t buy Conley’s claim that he didn’t see two fellow officers wailing on Cox. It was assumed that if Conley could have witnessed the beating, Conley must have witnessed the beating. The conclusion was he was lying to protect the other officers. Conley was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and was sentenced to thirty-four months in jail and a $6,000 fine.

Conley continued to maintain he had not seen Cox’s beating. Conley was also a defendant in 1998 federal civil case brought by Cox, but was found not liable.

While there several controlled experiments demonstrating the inattentional blindness effect, specific real world examples of the phenomenon were in short supply. Conley’s case caught the attention of invisible gorilla test creators Christopher Chabris and Daniel J. Simons, who teamed up with researchers Adam Weinberger and Matthew Fontaine to see if the scenario Conley was claiming was possible.

They designed an experiment involving participants chasing a researcher on a path while counting the number of teems the researcher touched their heads while running past a fight staged about 8 meters off the path. These results published in 2011 showed that officer Conley could have missed the fight because his attention was focused elsewhere.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485775/

Conley was eventually exonerated, rejoined the Boston police department and was awarded $647,000 in back pay. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3120

Aside — What happened as a result of the Cox beating case:

Cox settled his lawsuit against the city of Boston for $900,000 in damages and $400,000 in attorneys’ fees. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/sports/football/a-lesson-in-perseverance-for-giants-running-back.html?hpw&rref=sports&pagewanted=all . Cox went on to have a distinguished career with Boston PD, left to became chief of police in Ann Arbor, Mich. in 2013. He returned to Boston PD in 2022 to serve as police commissioner. The officer involved in the shooting that caused the 1995 chase was killed. All four suspects were tried for murder. Two were found not guilty and two were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Three of the four officers who beat Cox were eventually fired. None of them ever admitted to the beating. In a twisted twist, one of the officers who beat Cox, Dave Williams, sued for wrongful termination. He returned to the service with Boston PD in 2006. Williams was fired again in 2009 for brutality and lying to investigators in a case that involved a former Middlesex County sheriff’s deputy who was beaten after being arrested for a traffic infraction. Williams was reinstated again. As of 2023, Williams was assigned to handling domestic violence cases. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/a-boston-police-officer-was-fired-twice-arbitration-got-him-his-job-back-but-should-it/2967138/ Williams cost the city of Boston a total of $2.7 million in legal settlements for both brutality cases. Inattentional blindness has reportedly been used by defense lawyers in some cases where a police officer’s version of events does not match from video or forensic evidence. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5605606/ The Inattentional blindness defense has been criticized because it could be used to excuse nearly any officer-involved shooting.

However, it really is possible to look directly at something and not see it. This is known as blindness despite fixation. The results of an experiment based on the invisible gorilla and basketball experiment – which children as subjects – suggested that people can look directly at an object and still not perceive it exists. In that experiment, just 40 percent of participants saw the gorilla.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810006000031?via%3Dihub

Blindness despite fixation is by no means limited to children. The con artist’s card game, Three-card Monte, is an example of blindness despite fixation in action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_monte

Is it possible to break free of inattentional blindness? Yes. After all, some people DO see the gorilla AND count the correct number of basketball passes.

Cognitive psychologists Chabris and Simons’ book, The Invisible Gorilla , published in paperback in 2011 by Harmony, “reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings” and “explain(s) why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects.” In a description of the book authors say that “the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.”

http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/buy_book.html

Christos Vachtsiavanos

Human Behavior

The Invisible Gorilla experiment: What are the limits of our attention?

May 7, 2023
By Christos Vachtsiavanos

The Invisible Gorilla experiment is a well-known psychological study from 1999, and highlights our cognitive biases and the limitations of our attention.

This now-classic research project has shown that selective attention has implications for various aspects of our lives, from decision-making to personal safety.

In the next 4 minutes, you will explore the Invisible Gorilla experiment, the phenomena of selective attention and inattentional blindness, and examples of inattentional blindness in real-life scenarios.

Also, I will mention the consequences of inattentional blindness and hopefully provide helpful ways to deal with its effects.

The Invisible Gorilla experiment

In the late 1990s, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment in which they instructed participants to watch a video of two groups of people passing a basketball.

Participants were instructed to count the number of passes made by one team while ignoring the other team’s passes. An easy task that requires some amount of focus.

However, the video included a small surprise.

While the people were throwing the ball at one another, a person wearing a gorilla suit walked through the scene, stopped in the middle, pounded their chest, and then walked off.

That’s too crazy to be ignored, right?

Well, the researchers found that despite the gorilla’s prominent appearance in the video, around 50% of the participants did not notice it.

This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness and occurs when an individual is so focused on a particular task or stimulus that they overlook other unexpected stimuli in their environment.

That was the Invisible Gorilla experiment, which is now considered a classic one in the field of human behavior.

Selective attention: What does the Invisible Gorilla experiment teach us?

The Invisible Gorilla experiment teaches us that human attention is selective and limited.

We cannot process all the information presented to us at once, so we must selectively attend to specific stimuli while filtering out others. That allows us to focus on essential tasks but can also cause us to overlook unexpected or potentially critical events.

Inattentional blindness is not a sign of incompetence or lack of intelligence. It instead highlights the inherent limitations of human attention.

Understanding this phenomenon can help us become more aware of our cognitive blind spots and develop solutions to mitigate their harmful effects.

The police pursuit example

One real-life example that illustrates the consequences of selective attention and inattentional blindness is a 1995 police pursuit incident.

During a high-speed chase, police officer Michael Cox chased a suspect on foot while other officers arrived at the scene. The arriving officers mistakenly believed Cox was a suspect and began assaulting him.

At the same time, another officer, Kenny Conley, continued pursuing the same suspect on foot and ran past the altercation without noticing it.

Conley was later convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, as he claimed not to have seen the assault.

Researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted a study to test the plausibility of Conley’s claim.

During their experiment, participants jogged behind an assistant, counting the number of times the assistant touched their hat.

While jogging, the participants passed a staged fight.

The results showed that more than 40% of the participants missed the fight in broad daylight, and 65% missed it at night.

This experiment showcased that Conley’s claim was plausible, proving the powerful effects of inattentional blindness.

The radiologist experiment

Another example that highlights the implications of the Invisible Gorilla experiment in professional contexts involved radiologists.

In a study conducted by psychological scientists Trafton Drew, Melissa Vo, and Jeremy Wolfe, 24 experienced radiologists were asked to examine CT scans of patients’ lungs, searching for nodules that could indicate lung cancer.

However, in a set of scans, the researchers inserted a small image of a gorilla into the lung scan.

Despite the gorilla being 48 times larger than a typical nodule, 83% of the radiologists failed to notice the gorilla while focusing on identifying the cancerous nodules.

This study shows that even highly trained professionals are susceptible to inattentional blindness when their attention is focused on a specific task.

How can inattentional blindness hurt us?

Selective attention can significantly help us when we need to focus on a specific task for a given period, but leading to inattentional blindness can also hurt us in different ways:

Decision-making: Focusing on a single aspect of a complex decision can lead to neglecting other essential factors, resulting in mediocre outcomes.
Work performance : Selective attention can cause critical mistakes in tasks that require different skills to deal with a specific problem.
Personal safety: In high-stress situations or while multitasking, we may overlook potential hazards, increasing the risk of accidents or injury.
Interpersonal relationships: Selective attention can prevent us from understanding others’ perspectives or empathizing with their emotions, leading to miscommunication and conflict.

7 ways to deal with inattentional blindness

Selective attention is a natural cognitive process, but we need to find ways to mitigate the potential negative consequences of its by-product, inattentional blindness.

Here are 7 ways to deal with inattentional blindness:

1. Increasing awareness

Recognize that your attention has limitations and that you may miss things even when you believe you are paying close attention.

2. Practicing mindfulness

By trying out mindfulness exercises, you can better understand what your mind is focused on and, in that way, enhance focus and self-awareness in the long term.

3. Breaking tasks into smaller parts

By dividing tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces, you can allocate attention more effectively and, as a result, reduce the chances of overlooking critical details.

4. Taking breaks

Taking breaks is equally important as doing focused work. Regular breaks can prevent mental fatigue, which can exacerbate inattentional blindness.

5. Collaborating with others

We all have flaws and different qualities as human beings. That’s why working in teams can help compensate for individual attentional limitations; different perspectives increase the likelihood of identifying critical information.

6. Limiting distractions

Create an environment that minimizes external distractions, allowing you to focus more effectively on the task at hand.

7. Prioritizing tasks

Rank tasks by importance and allocate your attention accordingly to ensure you address the most critical aspects first.

The Invisible Gorilla experiment is a reminder of the limitations of our attention as human beings.

By understanding how selective attention and inattentional blindness work, we can become more aware of our cognitive biases and work to counteract any possible adverse outcomes.

Also, if we can find ways to enhance our focus while addressing the effects of inattentional blindness, we can enjoy better decision-making, improved work performance, increased personal safety, and more effective interpersonal communication .

The ultimate purpose is to acknowledge, on the one hand, the limits of our attention and, on the other hand, to address them whenever possible.

In that way, we can navigate the complexities of the modern world more effectively and purposefully.

If you want to receive more posts like this to your inbox every week, subscribe to my newsletter below for free.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn: Christos Vachtsiavanos | LinkedIn

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the invisible gorilla experiment, and what does it reveal about human attention.

The Invisible Gorilla experiment, conducted by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, demonstrates the concept of inattentional blindness, where people can miss obvious things in their visual field when their attention is focused elsewhere. This experiment reveals that human attention is selective and has its limitations, showing that we cannot process all the information in our environment simultaneously.

How does selective attention impact our daily lives?

Selective attention impacts our daily lives by allowing us to focus on specific tasks or stimuli, filtering out irrelevant information. While this helps us concentrate and perform tasks efficiently, it can also lead us to overlook important or unexpected events, affecting decision-making, work performance, personal safety, and interpersonal relationships.

Can inattentional blindness be considered a flaw in human cognition?

Inattentional blindness is not necessarily a flaw in human cognition but rather a byproduct of the way our attention mechanisms are designed. It highlights the inherent limitations of our attentional focus, showing that while we can concentrate on certain aspects of our environment, this concentration can cause us to miss other, potentially significant information.

How can inattentional blindness affect professional performance?

Inattentional blindness can affect professional performance by leading to critical mistakes, especially in tasks requiring comprehensive attention to detail. For instance, healthcare professionals may overlook anomalies in diagnostic images, or law enforcement officers might miss crucial evidence during investigations, demonstrating the need for strategies to mitigate these effects.

What strategies can help mitigate the effects of inattentional blindness?

Strategies to mitigate inattentional blindness include increasing awareness of attentional limitations, practicing mindfulness to enhance focus, breaking tasks into smaller parts, taking regular breaks to prevent mental fatigue, collaborating with others to benefit from diverse perspectives, limiting distractions, and prioritizing tasks to allocate attention effectively.

Why is understanding the Invisible Gorilla experiment important?

Understanding the Invisible Gorilla experiment is important because it sheds light on the selective nature of human attention and the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. By recognizing these aspects of human cognition, we can develop better strategies for managing our attention, improving our decision-making processes, enhancing work performance, ensuring personal safety, and fostering more effective communication in interpersonal relationships.

What role does mindfulness play in combating inattentional blindness?

Mindfulness plays a significant role in combating inattentional blindness by increasing self-awareness and the ability to notice present-moment experiences without judgment. By practicing mindfulness, individuals can improve their focus, become more aware of their surroundings, and potentially reduce the instances of missing important stimuli due to focused attention elsewhere.

How can teamwork help in reducing the effects of inattentional blindness?

Teamwork can help reduce the effects of inattentional blindness by bringing together diverse perspectives and compensating for individual attentional limitations. Working in a team allows for multiple sets of eyes and ears to observe different aspects of a situation, increasing the likelihood of identifying critical information that might be missed by an individual working alone.

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Missing the gorilla: People prone to 'inattention blindness' have a lower working memory capacity

University of Utah psychologists have learned why many people experience "inattention blindness" -- the phenomenon that leaves drivers on cell phones prone to traffic accidents and makes a gorilla invisible to viewers of a famous video.

The answer: People who fail to see something right in front of them while they are focusing on something else have lower "working memory capacity" -- a measure of "attentional control," or the ability to focus attention when and where needed, and on more than one thing at a time.

"Because people are different in how well they can focus their attention, this may influence whether you'll see something you're not expecting, in this case, a person in a gorilla suit walking across the computer screen," says the study's first author, Janelle Seegmiller, a psychology doctoral student.

The study -- explaining why some people are susceptible to inattention blindness and others are not -- will be published in the May issue of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition .

Seegmiller conducted the research with two psychology faculty members -- Jason Watson, an assistant professor, and David Strayer, a professor and leader of several studies about cell phone use and distracted driving.

"We found that people who notice the gorilla are better able to focus attention," says Watson, also an assistant investigator with the university's Brain Institute.

'The Invisible Gorilla' Test for Inattention Blindness

The new study used a video made famous by earlier "inattention blindness" research featured in the 2010 book "The Invisible Gorilla," by Christopher Chabris, a psychologist at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The video depicts six actors passing a basketball. Viewers are asked to count the number of passes. Many people are so intent on counting that they fail to see a person in a gorilla suit stroll across the scene, stop briefly to thump their chest, and then walk off.

Seegmiller, Watson and Strayer did a new version of the older experiments, designed to determine the reason some people see the gorilla and others miss it.

Why are the results important?

"You can imagine that if you're driving and road conditions aren't very good, unexpected things can happen, and individuals with better control over attention would be more likely to notice those unexpected events without having to be explicitly told to watch for them," Seegmiller says.

Watson adds: "The potential implications are that if we are all paying attention as we are driving, some individuals may have enough extra flexibility in their attention to notice distractions that could cause accidents. That doesn't mean people ought to be self-distracting by talking on a cell phone while driving -- even if they have better control over their attention. Our prior research has shown that very few individuals [only 2.5 percent] are capable of handling driving and talking on a cell phone without impairment. "

Strayer has conducted studies showing that inattention blindness explains why motorists can fail to see something right in front of them -- like a stop light turning green -- because they are distracted by the conversation, and how motorists using cell phones impede traffic and increase their risk of traffic accidents.

Linking Working Memory to Inattention Blindness

A key question in the study was whether people with a high working memory capacity are less likely to see a distraction because they focus intently on the task at hand -- a possibility suggested by some earlier research -- or if they are more likely to see a distraction because they are better able to shift their attention when needed.

The new study indicates the latter is true.

"We may be the first researchers to offer an explanation for why some people notice the gorilla and some people don't," Watson says.

Working memory capacity "is how much you can process in your working memory at once," Seegmiller says. "Working memory is the stuff you are dealing with right at that moment, like trying to solve a math problem or remember your grocery list. It's not long-term memory like remembering facts, dates and stuff you learned in school."

The researchers studied working memory capacity because it "is a way that we measure how some people can be better than other people at focusing their attention on what they're supposed to," she adds.

The Utah study began with 306 psychology students who were tested with the gorilla video, but about one-third then were excluded because they had prior knowledge of the video. That left 197 students, ages 18 to 35, whose test results were analyzed.

First, the psychologists measured working memory capacity using what is known as an "operation span test." Participants were given a set of math problems, each one of which was followed by a letter, such as "Is 8 divided by 4, then plus 3 equal to 4? A."

Each participant was given a total of 75 of these equation-letter combinations, in sets of three to seven. For example, if a set of five equations ended with the letters A, C, D, G, P, the participant got five points for remembering ACDGP in that order. After each set of equations and letters, participants were asked to recall all the letters of each set. A few participants scored a perfect 75 score.

Participants had to get 80 percent of the math equations right to be included in the analysis. That was to ensure they focused on solving the math problems and not just on remembering the letters after the equations.

Next, the participants watched the 24-second Chabris-Simons gorilla video, which had two, three-member basketball teams (black shirts and white shirts) passing balls. Participants were asked to count bounce passes and aerial passes by the black team. Then they were asked for the two pass counts and whether they noticed anything unusual.

To remove a potential bias in the study, the researchers had to make sure the people who noticed the gorilla also were counting basketball passes; otherwise, people who weren't counting passes would be more likely to notice the distraction. So only video viewers who were at least 80 percent accurate in counting passes were analyzed.

The Utah psychologists got results quite similar to those found by Simons and Chabris in their original study in 1999: of participants who were acceptably accurate in counting passes, 58 percent in the new study noticed the gorilla and 42 percent did not.

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.

Future studies should look for other possible explanations of why some people suffer inattention blindness and others do not, including differences in the speeds at which our brains process information, and differences in personality types, the Utah psychologists say.

For a link to the gorilla video, see: www.theinvisiblegorilla.com

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Utah . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

Janelle K. Seegmiller, Jason M. Watson, David L. Strayer. Individual differences in susceptibility to inattentional blindness. . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 2011; DOI: 10.1037/a0022474

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