Simon and Chabris

• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Background - Focused visual attentions

  The clustered scenes of everyday life present ore objects than an individual can respond towards simultaneously, and oftern more then can be fully perceived at any one time. Accordingly, mechanisms of attention are required to select objects of intrest for further processing. In the case of vision, one such mechanism is provided by eye movements, which allow an individual to fixate on particular regions so they benefit from the greater acuity of the fovea. Attention is necessary change detection.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Background - Change Blindness

  Individuals oftern do not detect large changes to objects and scenes from one view to the next, particulary if those objects are not the centre of intrest in the scenes. Individuals perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive focused attention.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Background - Inattention Blindness

  When attention is divereted to another object or task. Observers oftern fail to perceive an unexpected object, even if it appears at fixation.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Aim

  To investigate the influence of several factors on inattention blindness. The factors were: 1. The effect of superposition compared to live events within the video

  2. The impact of the difficulty of the task

  3. The impact of the unusualness of the unexpected event
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Research method and experimental design

  Laboratory experiment using independent measures
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Iv

  1. Unexpected event: - Umbrella women

  - Gorilla

  2. Video style: - Transparent

  - Opaque

  3. Team colour: - Black

  - White

  4. Task difficulty: - Easy (keep count of passes made by their team)

  - Hard (keep count of the amount of bounce passes and aerial passes separately)

  Overall 16 individual conditions
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Dv

  Number of participants who noticed the unexpected conditions
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Materials

  Four video tapes, each 75 seconds long. Each tape showed two teams of three players, one team wearing white shirts, the other black shirts. Players moved around in a relatively random fashion in an open area in front of three elevator doors. The members of each team passed a standard orange basketball to one another in a standardised order.Passes were either bounce or aerial. Players would also dribble the ball, wave their arms and make other movements consistent with their overall pattern of action. After 44-48 seconds of action one of two unexpected events occured: in the umbrella woman condition, a tall woman holding an open umbrella walked through the action. In the gorilla condition, shorter woman wearing a gorilla costume walked through the action in the same way. In either case, the unexpected event lasted 5 seconds, and the players continued their actions during and after the event and ignored the unexpected event.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Videos

  There were two styles of videos: in the Transparent condition, the white team, black team and unexpected event were all filmed separately, and the three video streams were rendered partially transparent and then superimposed by using digital video-editing software. In the Opaque condition, all seven actors were filmed simultaneously as a live event.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Sample

  228 participants, almost all undergraduate students. Each participant either volunteered to participate without payment, received a large candy bar for participating, or was paid a single fee for participating in several experiments.

  Data from 36 participants were discarded so results were used from 192 participants. These were equally distributed across the 16 conditions.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Procedure

  21 experiments tested the participants. To ensure standardisation of procedures a written protocol was devised and reviewed with the experiments before the data collection was begun. All participants were tested individually and gave informed consent.

  Before viewing the video tape, participants were told they would be watching two teams of three players passing basketballs and that they should pay attention to either team in white or the team in black. They were also told to keep either a silent mental count of either the total number of passes made by the attended team or separate silent mental counts of the number of bounce passes and aerial passes made by the attended team.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Questions

  After watching the video participants were immediately asked to write down their counts.

  They were then asked the following questions:

  1. While you were doing the counting, did you notice anything unusual in the video?

  2. Did you notice anything other than the six players?

  3. Did you see anyone else appear on the video?

  4. Did you see a gorilla/woman carrying an umbrella walk across the scene

  After any yes responses, participants were asked to provide details of what they noticed. If at any point a participant mentioned the unexpected event, the remaining questions were skipped.

  After questioning participants were asked if they has previously participated in a similar experiement, heard of such an experiement or heard of the general phenomenon. If they said yes their data were discarded.

  Participants were debriefed.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Reasons participants were discarded

  They already new about phenomenon - 14

  They reported losing count - 9

  Passes were inaccurately recorded - 7

  Answers could not be clearly interpreted - 5

  The participants total pass count was more than three standard deviations away from the mean - 1
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Results

  54% noticed the unexpected event

  67% noticed the unexpected event in the opaque condition compared to 42% in the transparent

  65% noticed the umbrella woman compared to 44% who noticed the gorilla

  58% noticed the gorilla while watching the black team compared to 27% who were watching the white team.

  62% noticed the umbrella woman while watching the black team compared to 66% who were watching the white
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Conclusions

  Individuals have a sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Individuals failed to notice an ongoing and highly salient, but unexpected event, if they are engaged in a primary monitoring task.

  The levels of inattentional blindness depends on the difficultly of the primary task.

  Individuals are more likely to notice unexpected events if these events are visually similar to the events they are paying attention to.

  Objects can pass through the spatial extent of attentional focus and still not be seen if they are not specifically being attended to.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Additional observation

  After Simon and Chabris carried out this study they wereintrested in whether a longer, more striking unexpected event would be noticd by participants. They carried out a small controlled observation. 12 new participants watched a short opaque video recording, where the gorilla walked from right to left into the live basketball passing event, stopped in the middle of the players as the action continued all around it, turned to face the camera, thumped its chest, and then resumed walking across the scene. Only 50% noticed the event. This suggests that even when the event is particularly striking, it still tends to go unnoticed by the observer.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Evaluation - Research methods

  Lab experiment: S: High reliability

  W: Low ecological validity
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Evaluation - Sample

  228 students: S: High population validity

  W: More time consuming
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Evaluation - Data

  Quantitative: S: Easy to analyse

  W: No detail
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Evaluation - Validity

  Ecological: Low as it is a lab experiment

  Population: High as it is a large sample

  Low as it is students
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Evaluation - Reliability

  High as it is a lab experiment
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Evaluation - Ethics

  No issues - Informed consent
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Debate - Nature/Nurture

  The process of auditory attention is an innate mental/cognitive process - this supports the nature end of the debate

  However selective attention is about how we selectively choose what to listen to in the environment around us and how meaningful material can break through the attention barrier

  Visual processing and perception is also an innate biological and mental process

  However the situation of dynamic events and focusing attention is situational

  We can also learn to be more attentive to what is around us
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Debate - Free will/ Determinism

  Our cognitive processes have an influence over our behaviour and we have no conscious control over some of these processes
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Debate - Psychology as a science

  Supports through the use of: Ivs and Dvs

  Controlled lab experiments

  Standardised procedures and

  instructions

  Collection of quantitative data
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Debate - Practical applications

  Eye witness accounts

  Explanation for failure to see things

  Driver safety awareness
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Link to area

  Perception and visual attention is a cognitive activity involving internal mechanisms processing sensory information.

  Visual processing involves attention, perception and thought.

  Simons investigated inattentional blindness by measuring whether participants noticed an unexpected event whilst concentrating on a task

  Participants found it difficult to notice unexpected events when focusing on a visual task and the more difficult the task the less likely they were to see an unusual event in the scene.
• Psychology - Simon and Chabris - Link to theme

  Simons showed that visual attention is an unconscious process and that we cannot process information that does not pass from the retina to the visual cortext - Therefore the object or event is not perceived and we experience inattentional blindness