Do Elderly People See the Gorilla? Effects of Aging on Inattentional Blindness

1835 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Parental influence on child behavior

In 1995, a Boston police officer responded to a 911 call regarding a shooting. Spotting a potential suspect he gave chase. During the pursuit the officer ran by an assault in progress without stopping to assist the victim. Later, he would claim that he never saw the assault because he was focused on chasing his suspect (Chabris, Weinberger, Fontaine & Simmons, 2011). This is an example of inattentional blindness or the failure to perceive objects or events when attention is focused elsewhere (Mack & Rock, 1998). Parents distracted by children, teenagers talking on cellphones and even professionals trained to be observant of their environment can fall prey to this phenomenon. Though people are not susceptible to inattentional blindness to the same degree, it is feasible that some may be less susceptible due to difficulties staying focused on a task at hand. This paper will examine the possibility that elderly people are less susceptible to inattentional blindness due to a decrease in attention skills.

Though the term “inattentional blindness” would not be conceived until 1998, the concept itself is not new. As cited by Simons and Chabris, Hungarian neurologist and psychiatrist Rezso Balint wrote in 1907 “It is a well-known phenomenon that we do not notice anything happening in our surroundings while being absorbed in the inspection of something…” (1999). Using the term “selective looking,” Ulric Neisser, an American psychologist, demonstrated this idea in 1979. In his study, he instructed subjects to count the number of times a group of participants threw a basketball to each other. While the subjects were focused on this attention demanding task, a woman with an umbrella walked in the middle of the participants. At th...

... middle of paper ...

...s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McCarley, J. S., Mounts, J. R. W., & Kramer, A. F. (2004). Age-related differences in localized attentional interference. Psychology and Aging, 19(1), 203-210. doi: 10.10370882-7974.19.1.203

Neisser, U. (1979). The control of information pickup in selective looking. In A. D. Pick (Ed.), Perception and its Development: A Tribute to Eleanor J. Gibson (pp. 201-219). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Rizzo, M., Sparks, J., McEvoy, S., Viamonte, S., Kellison, I., & Vecera, S. (2009). Change blindness, aging, and cognition. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 31(2), 245-256. doi: 10.1080/13803390802279668

Simons, D. J. & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception 28, 1059-1074. Retrieved from http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf

Show More
Related

  • Now You See It by Cathy Davidson

    1322 Words  | 3 Pages

    A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...

    Read More

  • Over Diagnosis And Over Prescriptions Of Adhd

    1834 Words  | 4 Pages

    brain tissue in the areas of the brain associated with attention; however, as they grow up the

    Read More

  • The Introduction to Vigilance Decrement Theory

    938 Words  | 2 Pages

    viVigilance tasks require great deal of attention for an extended period of time. (Helton & Warm 2008) People who take place in such tasks usually find themselves struggling to concentrate after a period of time, this leads to decrease of accuracy and speed of the task, also known as vigilance decrement. There have been previous researches that suggest studies that have been the introduction to vigilance decrement theory. During the years of World War 2, radar system were used to detect enemy’s means of transport (submarine) while being under water. (Caggiano & Parasuraman , 2004). The radar monitor was also used couple of years after the world war 2 on Royal Air Force, same results had occurred. (Helton & Warm 2008). It was concluded that there has been a decrease in performance, the longer someone spends staring at radar monitors, their level of vigilance drops significantly. (Caggiano & Parasuraman , 2004) There have been many more studies that were carried for people who work for Macworth, studies showed attention can only be sustain for a short period of time, the longer the period of time was for vigilance task the worse they performed. This has been said for both human beings and non-human beings. (Helton & warm 2008)

    Read More

  • Different Theories of Inattentional Blindness

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    Classical theories demonstrating the inattentional blindness paradigm are (1) the perceptual load, (2) inattentional amnesia and (3) expectation.

    Read More

  • Dementia: How to Help a Loved One

    814 Words  | 2 Pages

    DEFINING AND DIAGNOSING DEMENTIA. (2005). In The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing. Retrieved from https://hodges.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://www.credoreference.com.hodges.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Confirmation Bias

    296 Words  | 1 Pages

    Chapter 3 introduces an idea on confirmation bias. This is when people who have already concluded their thinking is accurate and correct, finds evidence to support what they have already known or believe. This occurs especially when an individual is so focused on an idea or object, which correlates with chapter 40 on inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness draws our perception away from surrounding details because the majority of us choose to focus on one particular detail that causes us to be thinking in a confirmation bias way for what we favor is to be the “right” answer in the world.

    Read More

  • Research Paper: Gender Differences And The Brain

    1482 Words  | 3 Pages

    Xu, J., Kobayashi, S., Yamaguchi, S., Iijima, K. I., Okada, K., & Yamashita, K. (2000). Gender effects on age-related changes in brain structure. American Journal of Neuroradiology, 21(1), 112-118.

    Read More

  • Perceptual Differences Between Men and Women

    2194 Words  | 5 Pages

    In his 2002 review, Ronald A. Rensink, divides the study of change detection into three phases (Rensink, 2002). The first phase, from mid-1950s to mid-1960s, investigates change detection when change occurs in a saccade. Whilst change detection was considered an easy task at the time, the studies showed poor results proving that detection is not a simple task after all. In the second phase he combines the studies on limits of detection of gap contingent changes with those on visual integration as a basis of limited capacity visual short-term memory. And finally, in the third phase, Rensink emphasizes the idea that change detection involves mechanisms central to the way humans perceive the world.

    Read More

  • Attentional Blink Research Paper

    2501 Words  | 6 Pages

    Attentional blink occurs when there is “a brief slow-down in mental processing due to having processed another very recent event” (Ashcraft & Radvansky, 2009, p. 137). During this timeframe, allotting your attention to the first stimulus deprives you of the attention required for the next stimulus. The types of objects or targets presented can have an effect on the brain’s focus. Stimuli that one associates as emotionally charged can cause the brain to focus more. Less emotional stimuli can cause a forgetting response. The study of the attentional blank is important to consider for many reasons including which occupations could be adversely affected

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Change Blindness

    950 Words  | 2 Pages

    Our attention is very selective when it comes to getting information from our environment. We could be looking at everything within our environment and miss changes that occur while looking. According to Rensink, O’Regan and Clark (1997), attention is a key factor, meaning when our attention is focused on the area of change then change can be detected. When we fail to detect change, it can result in change blindness. In support of this idea, Simons and Levin (1998) suggest that change blindness occurs if there is a lack of “precise” visual representation of their surroundings. In other words, a person can be looking at an object and not fully notice a change.

    Read More

  • Memory Accuracy Improved with Eye Closure and Focused Meditation

    1806 Words  | 4 Pages

    distraction during retrieval affects the quality, not the quantity, of eyewitness recall. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26(2), 296-300.

    Read More

  • Mcgurk Effect: People's Perception Of The Outside World

    504 Words  | 2 Pages

    During change blindness, if a scene changes and a person is not attending to it they will not notice the changes. For example, if a person pulls up at the drive-through at McDonald’s, suddenly someone screams in the back, the driver will turn back to see who screamed and when they turn back towards the window they might not notice that a different person is serving. This occurs due to the driver not paying attention to the scene and when it changes there is momentary blindness. In addition, this concept is related to top-down processing because the context stays the same while target object changes. Therefore, this disapproves the proposal that what we see is a correct portrayal of the

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Visual Perception

    538 Words  | 2 Pages

    Humans rely heavily on visual input from the environment around us. This makes sense since our senses of smell and hearing are not as sensitive as other animals. The study of visual attention investigates how the visual system is able to focus on a number of events occurring in our visual field. Visual attention also examines how many of these ev...

    Read More

  • Distraction Paper

    852 Words  | 2 Pages

    Moments later you hear discussion about what to grab for lunch right outside the office door, after listening in for a few seconds you come back to find several questions about your thoughts on the pitch being thrown at you. Becoming distracted is common among everyone, exactly how much focus goes into the task at hand depends on the level and the information load of said task (Lavie, N. (2010).). According to the perceptual load theory, unallocated capacity to the specific stimuli will flow into task irrelevant stimuli (CITE). If the perceptual work load is high, then awareness to what needs to be done increases, while if the perceptual work load is low then there is room for distraction. In a study on perceptual load done by Nilli Lavie, subjects were asked to locate the name of either a pop star or a politician among a list of either 4 or 6 words while ignoring an irrelevant distractor, in this case a face to the left or right of the words. Results showed that an increase in reaction time occurred when the perceptual load increased, supporting the idea that a higher amount of perceptual load leads a higher demand on ones’ attention to the task (Lavie, N., Ro, T., & Russell, C.

    Read More

  • Invisible Gorilla

    631 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Invisible Gorilla was an interesting book that questioned what we don’t realize we want answers too. We often take in an entire scene, but still miss the most obvious when we are not looking for it, because we are focused on the task at hand. The actual gorilla experiment video is proof of that. In the video, there were students in white shirts passing basketballs to students in black shirts, and the job of the viewer was to count how many times the ball was passed. Many viewers failed to notice that at some point in the video, someone in the gorilla suit walks into the middle of the basketball players, bangs their chest, and then leaves. Because most viewers are focused on the task at hand of counting the passes, they are oblivious to the gorilla.

    Read More

More about Do Elderly People See the Gorilla? Effects of Aging on Inattentional Blindness

Open Document