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Summary Simons + Chabris (1999) - study of visual attention
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A summary of contemporary key study - Simons Chabris (1999)
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Simons and Chabris (1999): Study of Visual AttentionBackground
We do not perceive everything in our environment all of the time.
An unpublished study by Neisser et al (1979) devised a divided-visual-attention task
in which 2 observers viewed superimposed videotapes of two teams playing a ball-
passing game. Observers were asked to attend to one of the teams, pressing a key
whenever one team member made a pass, whilst ignoring the actions of the other
team. After a short time, a woman carrying an open umbrella walked across the
screen - the games then continued after she walked off. It was found that of 28
observers, only 6 reported the presence of the umbrella woman, however, when
observers just watched the screen without performing a task, they always noticed
the umbrella woman.
Change blindness – failing to notice significant changes to objects or scenes
Inattentional blindness – when we are attentive to another object or task, failing to
perceive an unexpected object, even if it appears right in front of us.
Aim
To investigate inattentional blindness, the effect of superimposition and to measure
the impact of task difficulty.
Participants
There were 228 participants (observers) in this study, almost all of which were
undergraduate students.
They were recruited via volunteer sampling – either volunteering without
compensation, receiving a large candy bar for participating, or was paid a single fee
for participating in a larger testing session including another unrelated experiment.
Research Method and Design
This study was a laboratory experiment.
IVs – the transparent/opaque video condition, the gorilla/umbrella woman
unexpected event, the hard/easy task condition, the black/white team condition.
The IVs were intermixed to create 16 individual conditions.
DV – the number of participants in each of the conditions who noticed the
unexpected event.
The experimental design is independent measures because different participants
were used in each of the 16 conditions – all participants took part in only one
condition.
Materials
4 videotapes, each 75 seconds long were created. Each tape showed 2 teams of 3
(wearing black or white shirts) moving around in a random fashion in an open area in
front of a bank of 3 elevator doors.
The members of each team passed a standard orange basketball to one another in a
regular order: 1-2-3. The passes were either bounce passes or aerial passes – players
would also dribble the ball, wave their arms, or make other movements within their
overall pattern of movement.
After 44-48 seconds of the clip, either of the unexpected events occurred. Each
unexpected event lasted 5 seconds. Umbrella Woman – a tall woman holding an
open umbrella walked from left to right. Gorilla – a shorter woman wearing a gorilla
costume that fully covered her body walked from left to right.
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