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Summary 2.1 Problem 1: Where's Your Head At?
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Article summary + class notes of problem 1 of course 2.1: Thinking and Remembering.
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2.1 Problem 1: Where’s Your Head At?Simons: Failures of Awareness: The case of inattentional blindness
Abstract
- We think important things will always grab our attention, but they don’t, especially if
we’re focused on something else
- Failure to notice unexpected things when attention is focused elsewhere is called
inattentional blindness, e.g., gorilla experiment
Main
Selective Listening Tasks
Dichotic Listening – set of headphones plays 2 different things, tasked to repeat the things
coming into both ears. You won’t notice if the speaker in one ear changes language. You will
only notice large physical changes (e.g., switch from male to female speaker)
Vision
Neisser: subjects told to focus on how many times ball gets passed around/how many times
they clap hands, they didn’t notice other things
Chabris: white shirts vs. black shirts – person with umbrella walked through and subjects
didn’t notice
Influences:
- Similarity – people are more likely to notice unexpected objects that share features
with other items in display, e.g., if you count passes made by people wearing black
rather than white, you’re more likely to notice the gorilla (similar colours)
- Effort – if you have to keep separate counts of bounces/passes, you are less likely to
notice gorilla. Limits are not purely visual; you can also miss something when you’re
devoting cognitive resources (e.g., memory task). Greater demands on attention = less
likely people are to notice objects falling outside of attention
- The more distracted we are, less likely we are to be aware of surroundings. We
develop tunnel vision
Real-world Implications:
- Chabris: police officer experiment. Most people ran past the simulated fight, more at
night than during the day
- Hyman: people less likely to notice unexpected things while using their phone
- Inattentional deafness: while listening to a bunch of conversations, they fail to hear
someone saying “I’m a gorilla”
, Individual Differences in Noticing
- People w/greater working memory capacity may be more likely to notice unexpected
objects (Hannon & Richards) – but other studies say there’s no relationship
- People w/greater working memory capacity usually better at focusing on task at hand,
so probably less likely to notice unexpected things
- Ability to perform a task doesn’t predict likelihood of noticing, e.g., ability to track
objects doesn’t mean they could notice unexpected things better. ‘As long as people
try to perform the tracking task, they are relatively unlikely to notice unexpected
events’
- Mistaken Intuition: most people think they would be able to spot gorilla. Our
experiences mislead us, we don’t easily think about what we’re missing
(overconfidence)
- Evolution: our ability to focus was probably more evolutionarily useful than ability to
notice unexpected events
Most events don’t require our immediate attention, so if inattentional blindness delays
our ability to notice events, consequences could be minimal
Inattentional blindness has more consequences now than it did before, as everything
moves quicker now
What do we do about inattentional blindness?
1. Maximize the attention you have available by avoiding distractions, especially
under conditions for which an unexpected event might be catastrophic
2. Pay attention to what others might not notice. Only by understanding the limits of
attention and by recognizing our mistaken beliefs about what we ‘know’ to be true
can we avoid the modern-day consequences of those limits
Sternberg: Attention & Consciousness
Selective Attention
- Cocktail party problem (Cherry) = process of tracking one conversation while there
are other conversations (distractions)
Shadowing: you listen to 2 different messages (dichotic listening). You repeat back
one of the messages as soon as possible after you hear it, ignore the other one. Didn’t
notice language change. When their name was mentioned in a message, 1/3 of people
switched to the other stream. People who hear their name have limited working
memory capacity, so they are easily distracted.
3 factors help you selectively focus:
1. Distinctive sensory factors of target’s speech, e.g., high vs. low pitch, pacing,
rhythmicity
2. Sound intensity (loudness)
3. Location of sound source
You could also turn one ear toward speaker and other ear away – difference in
volume allows you to locate target sound
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