Non-attention blindness: Will you pass by opportunity?

Translator: Little Monster 2048 | Translations

Many things are obviously in front of us, but we ignore them, and this kind of thing happens often, in a classic case, a woman in a gorilla suit walks in front of her without anyone noticing her. Why? Because the observers in the experiment are busy counting the basketballs that have been passed around by the players! When they focus on this, the woman in the orangutan suit becomes irrelevant and therefore overlooked.

In a newly published article, Aro Heyman and his colleagues say their study expands on the phenomenon of "inattentional blindness" because they found that even if something is relevant to what people are doing, it is often overlooked. For example, a person can identify a tree to avoid hitting it, but may not realize at all that he missed a "cash cow" full of money.

There's a video on youTube called "The Money Tree," which Hayman and his colleagues were inspired to see and tie a three-dollar bill to the branches of a tree and place the tree on a path on campus. Spending a full two weeks observing, they recorded whether people passing by the trail bypassed the tree and found the money on it (they assumed that the person who found the money would stop to get the money or at least stop to look at it).

In the end, a total of 396 people walked under the tree (203 men), only 12 people approached the branches, and most of them simply identified the tree and bypassed it for safety. Compared to the total number of people, only a small number of passers-by noticed the money on the branches — 6 percent of the 396 people texted or called while walking; while 20 percent didn't use a phone.

In an earlier study, the same group of researchers set up a bulletin board next to the campus road that read, "Psychology research in progress." Two weeks later, the researchers observed 141 people passing by and interviewed passers-by 15 feet behind the bulletin board to investigate what they saw or didn't see. All passers-by successfully passed the bulletin board, but only 63 percent of those who passed by on the phone knew they had just bypassed the board, while 83 percent of those who didn't call realized. Passing by the bulletin board and being able to realize what was passing by, and then saying the words on the bulletin board — very few people. In other words, most passers-by just succeed in getting themselves around the bulletin board, but after a while they may not remember.

"People can guide their behavior based on some information about things without having to know what those things are —there is a clear separation between people's behavior and consciousness," the researcher explains. They noticed that in the bulletin board experiment, subjects who noticed the bulletin board at the last second (mostly cell phone users) had less impression of the bulletin board when asked afterwards.

and his team believe their study provides practical evidence to support the theory that two visual streams exist within the brain. These two visual streams are, respectively, the ventral stream that provides information for conscious processing and object recognition, and the dorsal stream that delivers information to the cerebral cortex to guide action behavior. Thanks to backflow information processing, they say, people can experience "unconscious blindness."

But is this interpretation correct? I was surprised that researchers didn't distinguish peripheral vision from focus vision, and it was impossible for passers-by to notice a "cash cow" or bulletin board in the context of peripheral vision, which only allowed passers-by to bypass obstacles — but because they didn't look directly at these "obstacles" at all, they didn't have enough information to identify what these "obstacles" were. This may be just an example of how people get only the information they need from their surroundings, rather than having to take all the information and extract the information they need.

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Source: blogspot.com

题图:Khanh Dat Nguyen

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