{"id":994,"date":"2011-05-05T16:46:10","date_gmt":"2011-05-05T22:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/?p=994"},"modified":"2011-12-02T06:46:30","modified_gmt":"2011-12-02T12:46:30","slug":"another-early-study-of-inattentional-blindness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/05\/another-early-study-of-inattentional-blindness\/","title":{"rendered":"Another early study of Inattentional Blindness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in October on our Psychology Today blog, I posted<\/a> about my re-discovery of what I then thought was the earliest systematic study of inattentional blindness. Turns out I was wrong. <\/p>\n

Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully-visible but unexpected object when you are focusing attention on something else. It is the phenomenon illustrated by our invisible gorilla studies. That study was conducted in the 1950s by a Tony Cornell, a parapsychology researcher \u2014 he found that people often didn’t notice him while he pranced around campus dressed as a ghost! (check out the post<\/a> — it is one of my favorites. I’ll eventually repost it here).<\/p>\n

As it turns out, there was at least one earlier experiment. Fifty years earlier, in fact. Just this week, my colleague Ira Hyman (he of unicycling clown fame<\/a>) pointed me to a section of a chapter from a book by Hugo Munsterberg, written in 1908!
\n

\"Image<\/a>

Hugo Munsterberg's book on eyewitness psychology. Source: http:\/\/goo.gl\/qL4ol<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

In it, he describes the following experimental result:<\/p>\n

I stood on a platform behind a low desk and begged the men to watch and to describe everything which I was going to do from one given signal to another. As soon as the signal was given, I lifted with my right hand a little revolving wheel with a colour-disk and made it run and change its color, and all the time, while I kept the little instrument at the height of my head, I turned my eyes eagerly toward it. While this was going on, up to the closing signal, I took with my left hand, at first, a pencil from my vest-pocket and wrote something at the desk; then I took my watch out and laid it on the table; then I took a silver cigarette-box from my pocket, opened it, took a cigarette out of it, closed it with a loud click, and returned it to my pocket; and then came the ending signal. The results showed that eighteen of the hundred had not noticed anything of all that I was doing with my left hand. Pencil and watch and cigarettes had simply not existed for them.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a pretty clear example of inattentional blindness, with at least some failure to notice objects and events happening outside the focus of attention. It has the flavor of a magician’s misdirection, with social cues directed to the other hand (see Kuhn, 2009 for an example).<\/p>\n

My favorite part of Munsterberg’s report, though, was his description of his own mistaken intuitions. He too suffered from an illusion of attention<\/em>, the belief that people typically notice salient and distinctive events.<\/p>\n

I had made my movements of the left are so ostentatiously, and I had beforehand so earnestly insisted that they ought to watch every single movement, that I hardly expected to make any one overlook the larger part of my actions.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just as we had expected people to notice when a person in a gorilla suit walked through a scene and thumped her chest at the camera, Munsterberg also had the wrong intuition about what people would and wouldn’t notice. <\/p>\n

I might try to replicate his method in my own lab — it’s one of the few real-world studies of inattentional blindness and provides a nice intermediary to magical misdirection and laboratory studies of focused attention and inattention.<\/p>\n

Sources Cited:<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Munsterberg, Hugo (1908). On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime. Clark Boardman Co., NY, New York.<\/p>\n

Munsterberg’s book is available online here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kuhn, G., Tatler, B., & Cole, G. (2009). You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection Visual Cognition, 17<\/span> (6), 925-944 DOI: 10.1080\/13506280902826775<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Hyman, I., Boss, S., Wise, B., McKenzie, K., & Caggiano, J. (2009). Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24<\/span> (5), 597-607 DOI: 10.1002\/acp.1638<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Cornell, A. D. (1959). An experiment in apparitional observation and findings. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 40(701), 120-124.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A cool inattentional blindness experiment from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,17,6,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-attention","category-examples","category-experiments","category-gorillas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1065,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theinvisiblegorilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}