Summary: Gorillas in our midst
Perhaps many people did experience: while searching for a spot they failed to notice their friends waving at them because their attention was fully focused on finding a spot that even when they looked right at their friends, they did not see them. The accuracy of visual representations has been of an increasing interest in the past 20 years. Many studies from the 1970s to the 1980s were conducted. The observers in these studies were engaged in a continuous task where they only focused on a certain angle and ignored other angles. An unexpected event happens, most of the observers however reported not seeing anything knowing that the visibility was clear to the subjects who weren’t taking part in focusing on the dynamic scene. There was a demonstration on the past few years that stated that the one of the main requirements of conscious perception is requiring attention. When attention is put on a new thing or event, subjects fail to notice the unexpected object even when it’s been there fixed. This is what we call inattentional blindness which is regarded as failure to notice an unexpected event or object even if it is in one’s field of vision because other tasks catching the person’s attention are being performed. This kind of experiments states that attention is mandatory for detecting change even though not sufficient. Attention is crucial to perception because without attention, the perception of visual features of our environment does not occur. One of the studies put observers to view two simultaneous events. The first event showed a hand-slapping game in which there were two players, one extending his hands, and the other player placing his hands on his opponent’s. The other event was of three p...
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...s blindness varies depending on the difficutly of the main task. The unexpected events might noticed more likely by the observers if they are similar visually to the main events that the observers are focusing on. The results of this experiment are much more consistent with the computer-based studies of inattentional blindness. The results of the experiments made so far also incite us to pay more attention on the findings from change blindness research. The change detection as in inattentional blindness studies depends more likely on the focus of attention. The findings of all experiments made so far suggest that unexpected events are most of the time ignored or disregarded knowing that in all those experiments, there was no requirements to ignore anything, however, there is still a questioning of whether these unexpected events would leave an implicit trace or not.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was a crucial literary tool in raising awareness of and forwarding the equal rights movement for African Americans when it reached readers of all races in the 1950's. The Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man claims that the novel envisions nothing less than undoing African Americans' cultural dispossession. Ellison's words are indeed an eloquent unraveling of social stereotypes and racisms. He employs allegorical conceptions of blindness and invisibility to dissect culturally ingrained prejudices and ignorance towards African Americans. Ellison also uses IM's settings and characters to reflect America and its stereotypes in order to achieve this goal.
Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm.
Kemp, NJ. "Social Psychological Aspects of Blindness: A Review." Current Psychological Reviews 1.1 (1981): Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
This report aimed to replicate Stroop's (1935) experiment. Using the repeated measures design and a sample of 20 students, differences in verbal reaction times on two tests were observed. The one-tailed hypothesis predicted that it would take longer to say words in the Cc, this is the conflicting condition where the colour of the word differs from the colour that the word describes. It was found that, using the t-test for related data, this hypothesis could be accepted as the obtained value was much greater then the critical value. It can therefore be concluded that visual interference does affect people's verbal reactions.
In his study, Kaplan (2001) defined environment fascination as the physical surroundings where people are free to pursue their interests, explore details in the environment, and personally define meanings in the environment. Fascination is a vital part of a restorative experience, which also requires for a person to completely change a habitual environment. Kaplan & Kaplan (2011) differentiate two types of fascination “hard” and “soft”.
Our attention is very selective when it comes to getting information from our environment. We could be looking at everything within our environment and miss changes that occur while looking. According to Rensink, O’Regan and Clark (1997), attention is a key factor, meaning when our attention is focused on the area of change then change can be detected. When we fail to detect change, it can result in change blindness. In support of this idea, Simons and Levin (1998) suggest that change blindness occurs if there is a lack of “precise” visual representation of their surroundings. In other words, a person can be looking at an object and not fully notice a change.
middle of paper ... ...137-137. Human Perception and Performance, 15(3): 448-456. Eriksen, C. W. & St. James, J. D. (1986). Visual attention within and around the field of focal attention: A zoom lens model.
The novel Blindness The sinners dealt with in our past novels and the present novel Blindness empathetically been assigned the trait of ignorance. Thus, providing the root of sin and degration of lives, as relating to the treatment of people in the short story Somni in the novel Cloud Atlas. Focusing on Blindness, the ungreedy are horribly dealt with by the thugs with a "conscience with teeth to bite" (18). This quality of man is the result of how humans sometimes favor short-term luxuries over long term consequences. This can be related to the car thief of the blind man near the beginning of the novel. So evidently, Saramago uses greed for fuel of ignorance to corrupt reason in this novel, and diagnoses the "sensual appetite" (171) of humans as a natural trait. The desperation of some people described of some people described in this novel such as the thieves, or the careless mad madmen who trampled over the blind relies on a psychological attempt to "escape their black destiny" and the reassuration from future hope(112).
There are varying degrees of blindness. There is complete blindness, where one is unable to see anything. There is limited blindness, where one is able to discern some things, but others may be outside of the field of vision or too blurry to distinguish at all. Also, there is selective blindness. This is where one chooses not to see things. It could be that one does not want to acknowledge what is happening around him, or it could be that one simply refuses to see things in any other way than his belief allows—meaning one is willfully choosing to ignore any other interpretation than his beliefs
There are many different fictional novels that I have read; however, one that is the most memorable is Blindness by Jose Saramago. The novel tells a story about a spontaneous, unexplainable epidemic of blindness that occurs in an unnamed city. The first part of the novel follows the experiences and misfortunes of the seven main characters, the first humans affected by the blinding disease. Then they are put into a filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined by the government. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, similar to the conditions in the outside society. As circumstances worsen inside the asylum, the inmates began to fight each other and eventually burn up the asylum. Due to the asylum’s destruction, the inmates are able to escape and join the other helpless blind people in the city, who wander and fight one another for survival. The second part of the novel focuses on the seven characters, trying to make their way in a completely blind city, where all humanity has descended into animalistic chaos. Only through the help of the one woman, who did not lost her sight, the seven characters are able to hold on to some shred of humanity and recognize what it is to be human.
The way that our brain processes information and responds to the awareness of things is a very complex system with in the brain. One study mentioned talks about the integration of senses in the brain and how we process the information. “Another study better illustrates the integrative nature of this synchrony. Words were presented in various locations on a screen; whether the subject became aware of the word’s color or if its location-indicated by being able to recall is later-depended on whether a frontal or temporal area was activated during the presentation. But if the individual registered both the color and the location, additional activity occurred in a part of the parietal cortex (Uncapher, Otten, & Rugg, 2006).” (Garrett, pg.501) This research demonstrates how different people react differently to stimuli and different levels of their cognition and awareness. It is important for people to develop a sense of awareness in order to function fully in the world. The book argues “that one apparent advantage is that it enables consistency and a playfulness in our behavior that would not be possible otherwise. (Garrett, pg. 502) It is human nature to rely on a consistency and the ability to plan ahead which is why the function of awareness is so important to the human
Change blindness is when something is gradually changed while inattentional blindness is when the change is caused abruptly. Although you are not actually blind, it is called misdirection, a technique commonly used by magicians and commonly linked to science. Scientists have also noted that implied movement looks like an actual movement in our brains. Understanding these tricks used by magicians for centuries can open a new realm of possibilities in enhancing rehabilitation for people who have brain
Rensink, Ronald A. Change Blindness. Rep. University of British Columbia, n.d. Web. 15 April 2014. < http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/publications/download/RR-MGY.pdf >