Two intriguing phenomena regarding visual attention and human behavior are inattention and change blindness. Generally, one would think that very discriminable changes to active stimuli in the environment can be easily detected, but research has shown this is not always the case. Previous research studies using photographs and motion pictures have reported participants’ lack of detecting salient changes in stimuli, but other studies have also shown such inadvertence to prominent changes in real-world interactions as well. In the video, Person Swap, an experiment was conducted on inattention and change blindness by using confederates to imitate a real-world interaction. The experiment proceeded as followed. First, a confederate with a map asked a pedestrian for directions to a certain location. The pedestrian first looked at the confederate and agreed to help. Then the pedestrian looked at the map with the confederate, but while the pedestrian was focusing on the map, two men with a huge portrait rudely walked in between the pedestrian and confederate. However, during the interruptio...
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 ...
One of the most common American proverbs is the expression to “never judge a book by its cover”. This saying, used for more than just books, is commonly used to express that what is on the appearance of something might not always show that things true nature or content. Even so people will often forget this fact and rely on their own perception. So what does this say about perception? To Victor Hugo author of the novel Les Misérables this would probable show that human perception is flawed and that people trust it more than they should. In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables he suggests that by following only our perception will not always lead to the truth, with the characters of Thénardier, Jean Valjean, and Inspecter Javert.
One wonders what takes place in the brain to cause such phenomenal differences in perception. The cause is unknown for certain, like many things in the realm of science it has not been researched nearly enough, but there are some indications.
Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm.
Everyone unconsciously follows the crowd and obeys until one person steps out to help then they all help. With obedience to authority it’s the same thing of feeling like you have to obey even though what you could be doing is inhumane or hurtful to others. Both of these experiments show people looking to follow and feeling as if they have to conform and do what they are being told whether it be an unconscious/ silent agreement or a spoken
The term of “bystander effect” was coined to explain the lack of action in an emergency situation when more people are nearby. Psychologists had tried to explain the absurd phenomena for years. Finally, in an eventful lunch, American psychologists Darley and Latane discussed to show and explain why such an event occurred. They designed an experiment where participants were asked to sit down in individual cubicles and could communicate with other subjects over an intercom system. There was actually only one real participant in the study; the other participants were pre-recorded voices, including one person that had a seizure. The researchers manipulated the...
Again the subjects surroundings and the authority over them affects the way they act and what they’ll do. In his experiment he put flyers out around town to get random subjects. He was offering four dollars and fifty cents for one hours work at the time people needed that kind of money to put food on the table so as he expected he had tons of subjects to choose from. He choose very specific subjects all men in the ages from 20 to 50 with different occupations.When he choose the subjects they didn’t know it would be a test of their obedience to authority even in crazy situations, but of their memory. Two subjects would go in at a time but one was an actor set by the experimenter and the other the actual subject. They were told that one person would be the teacher and the other the learner or student and that this would be selected randomly.But what the subject didn’t know is the actor was already the learner there was no random selection the experimenter just wanted it to seem that way so the teacher subject would truly believe it. After that each of them were strapped to a chair where they received 45 volts of electric shock. Crazy right well listen to this, the so called learner was to be strapped to the chair while the so called teacher would say a phrase and the learner would repeat it back. If he messed up the teacher would shock the learner with 45 volts
ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to defend a broad concept of visual perception, according to which it is a sufficient condition for visual perception that subjects receive visual information in a way which enables them to give reliably correct answers about the objects presented to them. According to this view, blindsight, non-epistemic seeing, and conscious visual experience count as proper types of visual perception. This leads to two consequences concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities of visual experiences. First, phenomenal qualities are not necessary in order to see something, because in the case of blindsight, subjects can see objects without experiences phenomenal qualities. Second, they cannot be intentional properties, since they are not essential properties of visual experiences, and because the content of visual experiences cannot be constituted by contingent properties.
Muller, N. G., Bartelt, O. A., Donner, T. H., Villringer, A. & Brandt, S. A. (2003). A physiological correlate of the “zoom lens” of visual attention. The Journal of Neuroscience, 23(9): 3561-3565.
...though the researchers weren’t looking for it, he results represent ideas that can help the bystander effect in a situation. Smaller numbers increase the percentage of realization when it comes down to an emergency. The victim, if cohesive, actually plays a big role in causing the bystander effect as well. When a victim is unable to verbally communicate with bystanders, it lessens the chance of help. If a victim is capable of communicating, the help given could be more efficient. This is because it can help break the diffusion of responsibility. A victim looking a bystander directly in the eyes can even spark a quicker reaction in them. These are all ideas that psychologists still study today, and many even consider learning about this phenomenon a requirement.
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.
Each one of us lives in our own unique world of perception. As individuals, we may experience life in an entirely different way through our senses and life experiences. Therefore, perception can be tricky since it is very personal to each one of us. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, perception has three meanings; (1) “the way you think about or understand someone or something,” (2) “the ability to understand or notice something easily,” and, (3) “the way that you notice or understand something using one of your senses” (2014, para. 1). C.S. Lewis said, “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are” (n.d., para. 11). In other words,
The way that our brain processes information and responds to the awareness of things is a very complex system with in the brain. One study mentioned talks about the integration of senses in the brain and how we process the information. “Another study better illustrates the integrative nature of this synchrony. Words were presented in various locations on a screen; whether the subject became aware of the word’s color or if its location-indicated by being able to recall is later-depended on whether a frontal or temporal area was activated during the presentation. But if the individual registered both the color and the location, additional activity occurred in a part of the parietal cortex (Uncapher, Otten, & Rugg, 2006).” (Garrett, pg.501) This research demonstrates how different people react differently to stimuli and different levels of their cognition and awareness. It is important for people to develop a sense of awareness in order to function fully in the world. The book argues “that one apparent advantage is that it enables consistency and a playfulness in our behavior that would not be possible otherwise. (Garrett, pg. 502) It is human nature to rely on a consistency and the ability to plan ahead which is why the function of awareness is so important to the human
Critelli, J. W., Keith, K. W. (2003). The Bystander Effect and the Passive Confederate: On the Interaction between Theory and Method. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 24 (3-4), 255-264.
Rensink, Ronald A. Change Blindness. Rep. University of British Columbia, n.d. Web. 15 April 2014. < http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/publications/download/RR-MGY.pdf >