the abyss means...

Yet recent work on visual integration and change detection reveals that we are surprisingly unaware of the details of our environment from one view to the next: we often do not detect large changes to objects and scenes ('change blindness'). Furthermore, without attention, we may not even perceive objects ('inattentional blindness')

...We examined differences in the detection of the two unexpected events. The Umbrella Woman was noticed more often than the Gorilla overall (65% versus 44%). This relation held regardless of the video type, monitoring task, or attended team, suggesting that the Umbrella Woman was either a more visually salient event than the Gorilla, more consistent with observers' expectations about situations involving basketballs, more semantically similar to the attended events, or all three.

In a separate Opaque-style video recording, the Gorilla walked from right to left into the live basketballpassing event, stopped in the middle of the players as the action continued all around it, turned to face the camera, thumped its chest, and then resumed walking across the screen (this action began after 35 s and lasted 9 s in a stimulus tape 62 s long).

In the experiment reported here, however, not one of the eighty-eight nonnoticers 'remembered' the Gorilla or Umbrella-Woman events when specifically asked about it, and several did not believe that the event had happened until the videotape was replayed for them.

Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events (PDF)

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Hm, this was on some godawful BBC pop-science programme a few months ago ("and next we'll find out how your eyes can SEE INTO THE FUTURE") - cleverly, they scattered similar gorillas throughout the programme to demonstrate that viewers wouln't notice them because they were busily paying attention to the presenter.

(And of course, I noticed all of them.)

Kevan on November 4, 2003 03:19 PM

Why am I reminded of the SEP(Someone Elses Problem) field that Douglas Adams dreamed up? Paint something pink and throw a SEP field around it and it's effectively invisible.

I'm consistantly amazed about how many of his observations about human behaviour are right on the button.

Makes one wonder if we really are descended from a bunch of telephone sanitizers.

Matt on November 6, 2003 11:12 PM