This week we went through a lot of different demos revealing two human weaknesses: (1) we miss a lot of what goes on around us, and (2) we are typically bad at estimating how much miss. 

We learned about two different phenomena (cognitive "illusions" if you will): inattentional blindness (when we fail to recognize an unexpected stimulus in plain sight) and change blindness (when we fail to recognize changes in a visual stimulus). 

So for instance, let's take a look at the Gorilla experiment

For people who have never seen it before, about 50% of people fail to notice the gorilla. But the boys *have* seen it before and when they saw the video this time, they were both expecting to see a gorilla. Because the gorilla is now an expected stimulus, the inattentional blindness did not apply to the gorilla. One question then is whether the boys will be better able to detect just the gorilla or whether they would be better able to detect other changes as well. To examine this, we watched "The Monkey Business Illuion" Video

Here are more videos for your entertainment on the "Invisible Gorilla" website

We went over a real-life example of inattentional blindness with serious consequences and discussed implications with talking on cellphones while driving, etc.

At the end, we covered more basic information about attention (how it's limited in capacity and duration), how it's selective (our ability to respond to certain environmental stimuli is dependent on our ability to ignore others), and how it's a basic part of our biology. We ran out of time while testing each other on the Stroop task, a classic psychological task showing how selective our attention is and what happens when there is interference. We will most likely continue covering attention next week.

Thanks!
Lily

-- 
Lily Tsoi
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Psychology
Boston College