How Little We Notice, In General (07-16-10)

In a famous experiment about a decade ago, researchers found that half the people asked to pay attention to something that actors in a video were doing failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit who walked between those actors.  Now researchers have determined that even people who have been told that a specific sort of unusual event will be included in a viewed scene often fail to notice other unusual events in the same scene, just like people who haven’t been warned about the first unexpected inclusion.    Our blindness to the unexpected when focusing on a task argues for intuitive design, particularly in public spaces.  People often do not see what they do not expect to be present.

Daniel Simons.  2010.  “Monkeying Around with the Gorillas in Our Midst:  Familiarity with an Inattentional-Blindness Task Does Not Improve the Detection of Unexpected Events, i-Perception, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 3-6.