unexpected bicycles and inattentional blindness

By Daniel Simons, on June 22nd, 2010

This article reports a tragic accident that happened on Sunday. A bicyclist was hit by a car and killed. Unfortunately, such accidents are far too common, and this particular example typifies how inattentional blindness operates in the real world.

Most people believe that unexpected or unusual events draw attention, perhaps even more […]

Category: anecdote, attention, intuition, patterns, perception | Leave a comment

Seeing faces in inanimate objects

By Daniel Simons, on June 14th, 2010

Huffington Post has a cool photo gallery of faces appearing in embedded objects. This tendency to see patterns, especially faces, is something we are particularly good at doing. It’s also the basis for this wonderful American Express advertisement:

Unfortunately, our pattern detection mechanisms can be overly zealous at times, leading us to see patterns […]

Category: anecdote, patterns | One comment

When less is more (memory limits and correlations)

By Daniel Simons, on March 31st, 2010

A series of articles by Yaakov Kareev from the mid-late 1990s showing something remarkable: People with less working memory capacity are better able to detect moderately strong correlations (Kareev, 1995; Kareev et al, 1997; Kareev, 2000). Understanding why requires a bit of a digression into statistics. […]

Category: examples, experiments, memory, patterns | One comment - (Comments are closed)

I see gorillas

By The Invisible Gorilla, on March 19th, 2010

Hairless primates see religious figures everywhere. I see […]

Category: gorillas, patterns | One comment - (Comments are closed)