The Pros And Cons Of Inattentional Blindness

Gorilla in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, contrary to popular belief, is not about gorillas in the zoo. The entire article is a focus upon inattentional blindness, which is a lot more common in situations than one were to believe. The focus of inattentional blindness is brought on by a study that includes many volunteers, mainly undergraduate students in the attempts to point out that one can be so focused on one thing that they could completely miss a gorilla coming into the room, or some other obscure factor that occurs without anyone noticing. Through multiple sessions of differentiating experiments, Daniel J. Simmons and Christopher F. Chabris from Harvard University were able to produce further insights
81 Exploring Psychology). Inattentional blindness just goes to show that humans are usually good at focusing, but only on one thing at a time. When you’re so focused on one thing, your mind is completely blind to other events that may be occurring. An example in the article of this is when you’re busy focusing on finding a seat in a movie theater, that you never notice your friends frantically waving their arms around trying to get your attention (Simons, Chabins). By not noticing your friends, you have fallen to the inattentional blindness focus of the experiment. Inattentional blindness is like a horse that has blinders on during a race, it is a sort of tunnel vision of an individual’s
The study uses over 200 undergraduate students to focus in on the task at hand. Some participants were volunteers, whilst others were paid a fee. The experiments conducted on the 200+ participants observing a basketball activity for short periods of time. The studies begin in short intervals of approximately one minute, or a few seconds more. The conducted experiment of the basketball activity showed multiple players moving in an irregular pattern while passing a basketball in a relatively organized pattern. The players were on teams and wore different colored shirts while doing so, and the players only passed the ball to members of their same team. Participants of the experiment were asked to count the number of times in which the ball was passed, but after the test had finished, the participant was asked if they saw either the gorilla come through the elevator, or the tall woman with the umbrella. During this test, the majority of participants did not recognize the object that came into the room. This proved their theory of inattentional blindness, observers were so focused on counting the number of times the ball was passed between players, that they seemingly had tunnel vision, and completely missed the gorilla in the room. When asked about if they had seen the obscure factor, few responded with a “yes,” but most did not notice. After multiple experimenters questioned the