The invisible Gorilla test

The invisible Gorilla test demonstrates that people notice few things when they concentrate their attention on a certain element. But what is the “invisible Gorilla test”? The test itself was launched a decade ago and now it has returned to show that people still can not pay attention, or at least that, when people do focus on a single thing, they do not see other elements connected to it or that occur in the general picture.

So, the study was asking people to watch a video in which 6 people are passing basketballs. Three of the individuals in the video are wearing black t-shirts and three are dressed in white and watchers are asked to count only the passes given by the ones that wear white. Sometime during the about 1.30 minutes video, a gorilla passes through. Because people focus their attention only on counting the passes, they miss the person dressed in a gorilla suit and studies show that half of the individuals that take the test without knowing what will happen don’t notice the gorilla. And it looks like that, even if you know that someone is supposed to walk in, you are just so focused on your counting that you can not see it.

So, the new research demonstrated the fact that people who know a surprising event is about to happen aren’t better in actually seeing it than the ones that have no idea that this is the purpose of the test. They can be even worse at noticing than the ones that aren’t expecting the unexpected.

In the video, when people are asked to count only the passes individuals in white give, they are ignoring the ones in black. The person dressed as a gorilla is also in black, and so this is why it is much easier to pass unnoticed, because people associate it with “the other team” that should not count. Do you think that if the gorilla will be pink people would see it easier?

The research was presented first in 1999 by cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. They appreciated that people focus so hard their attention on something that they can not see anything else, even if the unexpected is very clear and they are staring right at it. The details are very easy to miss when you are not looking for them.

The problem about this video is that it became so popular that people know they have to look for the gorilla before starting the test and this is what they are focusing at. This is why Simons decided to improve the video by adding a new element: some changes in the decor when it comes to colors. His supposition was that people who know that they should look for the unexpected are more likely to see such changes that the one that have no idea what the video is about. But, at the same time knowing about the gorilla can make you focus only at this element and ignore other unexpected.

Well, Simons test demonstrated that knowing about the gorilla didn’t increase the chances to see other unexpected events, so from the 23 volunteers he tested the video on, only 17 percent noticed the other changes. So, Simon conclusion was that after finding the element they are looking for, “people often don’t notice other things”. “Our intuitions about what we will and won’t notice are often mistaken”, he concluded.

So, did you notice the gorilla in the video?