Noticing Illusions
And why to keep trying — no matter how challenging it might seem!
Last issue, we checked out an optical illusion video that illustrated gradual change blindness — “a phenomenon in which observers are unable to notice changes to the world around them when those changes occur gradually.” As I mentioned in that post, there is other academic research around the difficulty of noticing change, and I want to share some of that with you today.
Specifically, I want to talk about two related (short) videos related to the broader idea of inattentional blindness — basically, that refers to stuff we miss because our attention is elsewhere.
One of these videos has, over years of use in talks and spreading online, become rather famous; the other is less well-known1. This makes them even harder to write about than last week’s video — but I’m going to try! Because I think there’s a useful point to be made about these videos as a pair.
The first one (the one that’s become famous) dates back to 1999, when Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted “the selective attention test.” This involved asking subjects to watch a short clip, in which six young people toss two basketballs around. Viewers are instructed to count “the number of passes made by the people in white shirts.”
The results became a staple in conference talks that related the “test” to an endless variety of subjects. If it happens that you’ve never heard of this experiment, it’s worth taking the selective attention test before you read any further. The video lasts about a minute and twenty seconds:
If you already have seen this clip — or even if you watched it for the first time just now — it’s worth taking the sequel “test,” which Simons created a decade or so later. It’s a minute-and-forty-second video. (If you’ve never seen either video, definitely watch the original before you watch this one.)
Obviously as I continue I’ll spoil the point of both experiments as I make a few observations below, so if you want to experience one or both, do so now. I recommend it.
Then I’ll share some of what the researchers have said about the results, along with my thoughts — and then, just for fun, a couple more short illusion/perception videos.
Okay. Again, lots of people are familiar with the original video above. But still: it’s pretty remarkable to note that roughly half of Chabris and Simons’ subjects did not notice the gorilla. (I first saw this clip during someone’s talk at an event many years ago, and I did not notice the gorilla either.) Noting that of course most people say they would see the gorilla in such a test, the researchers wrote:
“This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.”
(As I understand it, this is actually a variation on a similar study by Ulrich Neisser, which involved clips of basketball tossers and a young woman with an umbrella, whom 79 percent of Neisser’s subjects failed to notice. Apparently there have been lots of similar studies since.)
What’s more fascinating to me is the less-famous sequel study, and how it cleverly plays off the widespread familiarity with the original. Of course subjects who knew about the original experiment noticed the gorilla this time. (And I suspect there was a significant group who had vaguely heard about a gorilla/attention video and thus were primed to note the surprise.) But a wide majority of them completely missed the other changes that Simons had introduced.
This suggests that not only can we miss things by looking where we’ve been told to look (counting basketball passes), we can miss just as much by focusing on what we suspect in advance we’re not supposed to see. (We might even miss more in the latter scenario: Simons’ subjects who watched his second video but had never heard of the original experiment were slightly more likely to catch the background change and the exiting black shirt.)
"A lot of people seem to take the message of our original gorilla study to be that … by paying more attention and 'expecting the unexpected,' we will be able to notice anything important," Simons has said. "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.”
That’s kind of a frustrating conclusion! It suggests there is nothing we can really do about inattentional blindness — no matter how hard we try, we’ll always miss something. And what we miss might be more interesting than what we actually notice.
But I don’t totally buy that conclusion. To return to the theme of last week’s post, I think this is why a mindset is as important as a skill set. If we admit that there is no foolproof “noticing skills kit” that ensures we’ll never miss a thing, maybe that has a value of its own.
Maybe it’s good to stay aware that our attention can always be adjusted, will never be perfect. This, in short, is another reminder to ensure you’re making an effort to pay attention to what you care about, and care about what you’re paying attention to.
It’s always the right time to ask: What am I missing?
It turns out I had a file on this subject, so I’ll close by sharing a few more related videos from said file. If you have more, please share in the comments! Here goes:
How’d you do? How do you think your performance was affected by the videos you’d seen already?
This next one is a little different, more about visual perception. As Hyperallergic noted: “The laws of optics may be well known, but this video does a really concise job of clarifying the complexity of what we see and why we can’t always trust our eyes.”
Finally, this last video comes from an NPR essay that covers both optical perception and attention. By now you likely get the gist, but still, who can resist a card trick? This one isn’t what you expect — or is it? ;)
OKAY THAT’S IT! HAVE A GREAT WEEK!
As always, I value your feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.), as well as your tips or stories or personal noticing rituals, things we need a word for, and of course your icebreakers: consumed@robwalker.net. Or use the comments.
And thanks for reading …
rw
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All this by Rob Walker PO Box 171, 748 Mehle St., Arabi LA 70032
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Both videos were mentioned in the comments to last week’s post. Thanks to those readers for posting them without spoiling!
Makes me think of ‘breadth and focus’ in meditation. I think awareness of the breadth of experience is harder, the mind wants to latch on to one thing then another. But then there’s everything we miss.
On the other hand if we registered everything in our environment all the time we’d be totally exhausted! Not noticing everything is like putting ourselves onto battery saving mode.
Wondering whether these experiments demonstrate the limits of our attention...or affirm our innate drive to "win" at a challenge...!