You must have played this game called ‘I spy’ when you were little. It is a simple game where one person says “I spy, with my little eyes…” and names an object in their immediate surroundings. The other player or players have to find the object in a given amount of time. Have you ever realized that sometimes even if the object is in front of you, you fail to recognize it? It is caused by a phenomenon called, ‘Inattentional blindness’. Inattentional blindness is a psychological phenomenon wherein you fail to recognize something that is right in front of your eyes. When you finally identify the object, you may feel foolish that you missed something that was right there.
Usually, people believe that as long as our eyes are open, we can see everything. Even though the brain is constantly working in the background, we expect it to pay attention to at least the salient things that are clearly in our sight. For years scientists and the common man had similar views about how humans see. They believed that seeing is like recording a video through a camera and that whatever is being recorded is being seen by the person. But after so many studies on visual perception, scientists have now realized how drastically little humans see when they are not paying attention and called the phenomenon inattentional blindness. This discovery was something that scientists could never think was the case— that one couldn’t see something exactly in their sight. This was a very important discovery, not just for scientists but even for laypeople because all of us had a completely wrong understanding of how we see.
One of two perceptual phenomena that have started to alter scientists’ conceptions of visual perception from that of a videotape to something much less precise is inattentional blindness. Change blindness is a phenomenon that researchers first became aware of in the 1970s. They discovered that as long as the change takes place during an eye movement or when people’s view is otherwise disrupted, people frequently fail to detect a change in their visual pitch. Such discoveries have sparked discussions about how the brain retains and integrates visual information, as well as whether it does so at all.
Recent years have seen a rise in research based on inattentional blindness, which has given rise to other issues related to our inability to recognize unexpected objects when we aren’t paying attention. How much visual information can the mind consciously and unconsciously process? What causes some visual objects to be noticed consciously while others go unnoticed? What happens to data that is only inadvertently perceived?
As we find answers to these questions, they are likely to have great implications for human performance in domains like flying and driving as well as theoretically for researchers’ awareness of how the visual system operates.
When psychologists Arien Mack, Ph.D., and the late Irvin Rock, Ph.D., published the book “Inattentional Blindness,” describing a series of experiments on the phenomenon, the term “inattentional blindness” entered the psychology lexicon. For each of the various experimental trials, Mack and Rock’s typical approach involved briefly displaying a miniature cross on a computer screen and asking subjects to determine which arm of the cross was longer. After many attempts, the cross and an unexpected object, such as a vividly colored rectangle, both showed on the screen.
According to Mack and Rock, even when the unanticipated object appeared in the center of the subject’s field of view, they frequently failed to detect it as they were focused on the cross. Participants were able to notice such objects with ease when the cross was not drawing their focus. Following these first results, Mack and Rock found that participants were more likely to detect their names or cheerful face than other names or upside-down faces, or stimuli that were less significant to them. The researchers also discovered that, even though individuals did not notice the presence of unattended words given on a computer screen, these stimuli nonetheless had an implicit impact on how well they performed later on in a word-completion test.
We regularly experience inattentional blindness in our everyday life. for instance, while driving their vehicle, despite paying attention on the road, sometimes people fail to notice a car swearing in their can of traffic which then leads to accidents; Or maybe while watching a movie set in ancient Greece, you fail to notice a major blooper in which an airplane flies by in the background in one of the scenes; Despite your phone being right in your hand, you suddenly start looking for your phone.
The “invisible gorilla test,” conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, Ph.D., is one of the most well-known tests that showcase inattentional blindness. In this study, the participants were instructed to watch a video of basketball throwing while keeping note of the number of passes made or the proportion of throws to bounce passes. The participants were then questioned regarding any unexpected thing they observed while watching the video. In all the tests, about 50% of the participants said that they didn’t notice anything unusual.
Yet in truth, something strange had taken place. In certain cases, a lady in a gorilla costume would enter the frame, turn to face the camera, thud her chest, and then leave. The gorilla essentially vanished, making it seem unimaginable that the respondents overlooked such a sight given that their focus was somewhere else and on a difficult task.
We prefer to concentrate on the most significant things in the environment around us rather than on every little detail. We use our preexisting schemas to fill in the spaces in our vision. This strategy is very cost-effective. Relying on schemas enables us to allocate our limited attentional, cognitive, and processing resources to what concerns us most while still enabling us to have a full and consistent experience. Inattentional blindness is a common phenomenon that cannot always be prevented; however, it is crucial to keep this in mind, especially while arguing with somebody about the entire gravity of a situation. Your brain is developed enough to assist you in recognizing and understanding visual cues that it believes will be most useful to you. But, in its attempts to do so, important and seemingly insignificant visual information can occasionally be disregarded.
