Safe Speed Forums

Open the following link - it is a big download about 7meg, but it is well worth it..

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

It is a video of some people playing baskeball. Your objective is to count how many times the people in white pass the basketball from one person to another.

When you have watched the video, scroll down below.

DO NOT READ BELOW until after you have watched the video. If you read below before watching the video, the entire point is ruined.




































Did you see the gorilla?

Play the vidao again... and you will see it!

This is NOT a trick. This is a genuine piece of cognitive research. In random tests, something like 90% of people fail to see the gorilla. Absolute proof that your brain cannot concentrate on more than one visual event at any one time.

Cheers,

Russ

I'm in a minority group, wa-hey! Just as well the test wasn't really about counting the number of passes, I'd have definitely failed that one

I didn't do the test because I've seen it before. Certainly it's illuminating to some extent about the degree of filtering that takes place between the eye and the consciousness.

But I think the conclusions are reversed. It isn't about how easy it is to be distracted, it's about how well we focus on the stuff that we have defined important.

Putting this in the Safe Speed context, we'd be talking about the risk of missing something important on the road ahead because for a given fraction of a second the priority task has to do with speed enforcement.

Then I'd also put it in the context of being an experienced driver. Someone who has spent more than a couple of thousand hours behind the wheel refining his strategy for visual search and filtering out what's important from what's not.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I have to say I probably only noticed it because I was expecting a trick (cynical git that I am) and what I actually noticed first was an increase in black "shirts" THEN "Oh look one is a gorilla". I then called my daughter in, she's 4, explained we were going to do some counting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 monkey end of counting and start of giggling.
So! so far while Twister, my daughter and I all noticed the Gorilla, none of us managed to count the passes. Top of the class for being observant but bottom for completing the task at hand.
So it's not ALL a reversal
It makes an interseting case over road furniture, 90% may not notice it but of the 10% that do a proportion (so far 100%) have indeed had their concentration removed from the road.

Actually, in my case the failure to count the passes was caused by my not realising at the start of the clip exactly what was going on, so I only started counting after the first few passes had already occurred. To be honest, when the gorilla appeared I didn't pay much attention to it - I noticed another figure appearing in the scene, but didn't registed that it was someone in a gorilla suit until a few seconds later. It certainly wasn't a sudden distraction that would have almost certainly grabbed my attention away from the rest of the scene.

So in my case, perhaps the true value of this video is in showing that, when faced with a sudden barrage of visual information, the brain takes a while to process it all and start making sense of any of it - just as can happen when you turn a corner whilst driving and come face to face with a jumble of signs, lights, road markings etc...

They did a similar thing on Brainiac on Sky One, only it was a lunchbox being passed around as people walked about.
I never noticed the guy in the ridiculous bee costume until they replayed it

I never spotted the gorilla. however, I played it a second time and did so (after the prompt) - and also at that time counted passes from both white and black teams (sad or what?).

the original question asked me to watch and answer questions after, I think (but cannot be certain) that I would have spotted the lot.