Inattentional blindness facts for kids
Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental distractions. The phenomenon is due to how our minds see and process information. Closely related to the subject of change blindness, it is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time. Any otherwise feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention.
Experiments demonstrating inattentional blindness
The term inattentional blindness was coined by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992. It was used as the title of Rock's last text published in 1998 by the MIT Press.
The best-known study was a contemporized version of earlier studies which asked subjects to watch a short video in which two groups of people (wearing black and white t-shirts) pass a basketball around. The subjects are told to either count the number of passes made by one of the teams or to keep count of bounce passes vs. aerial passes.
In different versions of the video a woman walks through the scene carrying an umbrella, or wearing a full gorilla suit. In one version the woman in the gorilla suit even stops in the middle, faces the camera, and pounds her chest before walking out of the scene. After watching the video the subjects are asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary take place.
In most groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla. Simons interprets this by stating that people are mistaken with regard to how important events will automatically draw their attention away from current tasks or goals. This result indicates that the relationship between what is in one's visual field and perception is based much more significantly on attention than was previously thought.
See also
In Spanish: Ceguera por falta de atención para niños
