![]() ![]() ![]() Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice something that is completely visible because the person was actively attending to something else and did not pay attention to other things (Mack & Rock, 1998 Simons & Chabris, 1999). Because participants were so focused on the number of times the team dressed in white was passing the ball, they completely tuned out other visual information. You would think that someone would notice the gorilla, right? Nearly half of the people who watched the video didn’t notice the gorilla at all, despite the fact that he was clearly visible for nine seconds. During the video, a person dressed in a black gorilla costume walks among the two teams. Participants were asked to count the number of times the team dressed in white passed the ball. In this study, participants watched a video of people dressed in black and white passing basketballs. One of the most interesting demonstrations of how important attention is in determining our perception of the environment occurred in a famous study conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999). You can view the transcript for “selective attention test” here (opens in new window). See for yourself how inattentional blindness works by watching this selective attention test from Simons and Chabris (1999): That you no longer perceive the flashing light demonstrates sensory adaptation and shows that while closely associated, sensation and perception are different. The light is still flashing and filling your room with yellow light every few seconds, and the photoreceptors in your eyes still sense the light, but you no longer perceive the rapid changes in lighting conditions. It was as if someone was continually turning a bright yellow spotlight on and off in your room, but after watching television for a short while, you no longer notice the light flashing. The flashing light was extremely annoying when you first entered your room. You decide to watch television to unwind. Unfortunately, there are no other rooms available, so you are stuck with a flashing light. You check into the hotel, but when you get to your room, there is a road construction sign with a bright flashing light outside your window. Imagine going to a city that you have never visited. In fact, we often don’t perceive stimuli that remain relatively constant over prolonged periods of time. For example, upon walking into a kitchen and smelling the scent of baking cinnamon rolls, the sensation is the scent receptors detecting the odor of cinnamon, but the perception may be “Mmm, this smells like the bread Grandma used to bake when the family gathered for holidays.”Īlthough our perceptions are built from sensations, not all sensations result in perception. One way to think of this concept is that sensation is a physical process, whereas perception is psychological. ![]() Now you are processing the shape in a top-down fashion. When given a context, your perception is driven by your cognitive expectations. Figure 3. With top-down processing, you use context to give meaning to this image. ![]()
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