Just because you look at something doesn’t mean you see it.
By Decebal Leonard Marin
It has almost certainly happened to you, or you have seen it around you.
Why don’t people see the things that are right in front of them? Is it vision defects, negligence or incompetence?
Maybe neither one nor the other, or all together and one more.
The failure to notice unexpected objects or events when your attention is focused elsewhere is known as “Inattentional Blindness”
Unintentional blindness research
The term “inttentional blindness” was coined by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock to describe the results of their studies on the visual perception of objects with appearance unexpected. Their studies in the early 1990s are presented in their 1998 book “Inattentional Blindness” (Mack & Rock, 1998).
In 1999, researchers Simons & Chabris at Harvard University conducted one of the most publicized experiments on inattentional blindness — the “invisible gorilla test.”
For the study, participants were asked to watch a video and count the basketball passes of the players dressed in white, ignoring those of the players dressed in black. Distracted by this simple task, about 50% of the participants did not notice a person in a gorilla costume who walked directly over the video stage and even hit his chest before leaving.
More information here http://www.dansimons.com/videos.html and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bnnmWYI0lM.
Why did this happen?
With every look, we experience a visual world very rich in detail. Research shows that we perceive and remember only those objects and details that we focus our attention on. Indeed, as humans live in the world, we have to be selective about many things, we simply cannot absorb every sensation that comes to us. We call this satisficing, we make observations and learn to make decisions that are satisfactory, not perfect. We also do this by living in the world through heuristics.
According to Dr. Simons, inattentional blindness is explained by the fact that people have limited ability to pay attention, which makes us unable to absorb everything at once.
Overall, this limitation is a good thing, as it allows us to focus on what we care about and ignore distractions.
The failure to notice certain details is encountered even in very well-organized processes, such as that of a film production.
Thus, in Game of Thrones a cup of Starbucks coffee can be seen on a table in the Great Hall of Winterfell and in the film “Glory” a soldier wears a digital watch on his wrist during the American Civil War in the 19th century. In “Marie Antoinette“, among Marie Antoinette’s favorite accessories, there is a pair of Converse shoes, and in “Gladiator” viewers can notice a jet plane in the sky behind the actor in the lead role.
Daniel Kahneman (1973), Nobel Prize laureate in Economic Sciences, describes attention as a limited resource, which is allocated with energy effort, based on a motivation sustained by intention.
He says that one of the proofs is when the passenger in a motor vehicle suddenly falls silent when the driver is engaged in overtaking a truck on a narrow road. (Kahneman 2011).
Because our cognitive abilities – attention, working memory, and processing capacity are naturally limited, increasing the number of tasks reduces the quality of execution for all ongoing tasks. All of this is the normal nature of being a fallible human.
To focus on what is most relevant at any given time, our mind “fills in the blanks” with pre-existing schemas and thus allows us to have complete experiences.
Research shows that adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a condition characterized by difficulty maintaining attention, are actually less likely to be affected by unintentional blindness.
This may be because people with ADHD have a different cognitive style, which gives them an advantage when it comes to noticing new or dynamic stimuli in their visual environment.
If inattentional blindness involves the failure to perceive something because your attention is focused on something else, such as a task, object, or person, there is also a similar phenomenon called change blindness that occurs when people fail to see a change in a visual scene.
The following experiment showed that visual distraction can cause blindness to change.
A postal clerk behind a counter handed a parcel pick-up form to a customer and then leaned over behind the counter to look for the customer’s parcel. From behind the counter, however, another person appears, different from the first, who hands the customer the expected package. The second person in the experiment didn’t look like the first and was even wearing a different color T-shirt. Surprisingly, 75 percent of the subjects didn’t even notice the change.
It is interesting that a similar phenomenon is also encountered in the auditory field. When you focus on a specific sound cue, you may become deaf to other sounds.
Two English researchers, Polly Dalton and Nick Fraenkel identified such deafness in most of the adults they tested. While listening intensely to a female voice for one minute, they did not hear a male voice, which lasted for 19 seconds right in the middle of the test period and was heard clearly by those who did not listen intensely to the female voice.
Anecdotally speaking, we can say that men who have been told by their life partners that they have selective hearing when it comes to taking out the garbage, cleaning the house or going to the market, are saved: the results of this test confirm that they do not do it intentionally.
In conclusion, even if you send someone a very clear message, if their mind is elsewhere and their working memory is fully charged, this message can be filtered so strongly that for that person the message seems like it didn’t even exist. Why does all this matter?
Usefulness
Knowing the phenomenon and impact of inattentional blindness helps us to become aware of human limitations and how they can affect people in different situations.
In everyday life, inattentional blindness can have serious and sometimes tragic effects.
According to the General Inspectorate of the Romanian Police (IGPR), in 2023, 4,525 serious road accidents were recorded nationwide, resulting in the death of 1,545 people and the serious injury of another 3,535.
Many collisions involve cars hitting pedestrians or blocking the path of an oncoming motorcycle, electric scooter, or bicycle without the driver noticing them.
In the statements given after the accident, the drivers say something like: “I didn’t see it. It appeared out of nowhere and entered me” and the one who drives the electric scooter/bike/motorcycle: “I saw that the driver looked at me, but he didn’t stop.”
The more people focus on the expected aspects in their line of sight, the less likely they are to detect objects that appear unexpectedly. Recent studies show that talking on the phone, writing messages, or following social media while driving your car dramatically decreases the likelihood of detecting an unexpected object.
Landing a plane full of passengers is a very demanding cognitive task for the pilot. The large number of variables that the pilot must pay attention to during a landing – speed, altitude, engine power, drift, etc., produces a huge mental load.
In this complex situation, even if the pilot looks at the runway, sometimes he fails to see the plane in front of his eyes. Flight simulator statistics indicate that about 30% of trainee pilots and 25% of experienced pilots notice the runway being blocked too late.
Regardless of the field of activity, the information that a visitor or a new employee receives in the relatively short time allotted for safety training is so numerous that it overwhelms you.
Understanding the phenomenon of inattentional blindness is very useful both for trainers who design safety induction programs and for managers who conduct periodic occupational safety meetings.
As attention is not an automatic process, but one that must be activated, to learn it is necessary for the participants to activate their appropriate attention. Once activated, it is the duty of the trainer who leads the session to keep it awake.
Of course, selecting the most relevant information and presenting it in a practical and attractive manner, easy to understand, affects engagement and learning outcomes.
How we can reduce unintentional blindness
What can we do about inattentional blindness?
Research so far shows that inattentional blindness is not related to IQ or personality, nor can it be predicted.
At first glance, avoiding inattentional blindness can be achieved if we become more effective listeners. In reality, it is more complicated than that, because the human person works in a way that most of the time is not in direct rational control.
More on how the human mind works here: https://www.corporatedynamics.ro/de-ce-gândim-rar-și-câteodată-prost/
Because inattentional blindness occurs when the Mind is busy with another demanding task, training people to improve their attentional skills in general will not improve their ability to detect unexpected events.
Simons says, “There’s no evidence that you can dramatically change your core attention span, any more than you could train yourself to see ultraviolet light. Could you get a little better? Maybe, but if you can, the benefits will be very small.”
If it is not possible to completely prevent unintentional blindness, we can limit the factors that can aggravate it.
Driving measures may include:
- Reducing various distractions while driving – sound signals announcing the receipt of a message, phone buttoning, changing the radio station, eating food while driving, etc
- Sufficient rest
- Reducing the use of medicines or substances that decrease attention
- No guesswork doesn’t assume that other road users think like you and notice you when they look at you.
In terms of driver training, the approach used is to add to the checklist the instruction “check if the runway is clear and then confirm”. This produces better results than conveying to a young pilot the message “be careful of anything unexpected“.
The use of ferrying lists in industries where periodic preparation and verification does not happen to the standards of the aviation industry is useful, but it also carries with it the risk of turning their completion into an end.
The long-term use of checklists leads to a ritual of ticking off the items on the list, without paying due attention to the risk factors listed.
The stress and managerial pressure to which some workers are subjected from superiors or customers are factors that favor the occurrence of inattentional blindness and blindness to change.
At the organizational level, improving the work climate and increasing trust in the organization, the use of rest and recovery breaks can help reduce situations of inattentional blindness and increase job security.
To discover effective approaches to risk in the workplace, enter the www.corporatedynamics.ro.
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Rosa says
Excellent reminder for all of us. We are all susceptible.
Rob Long says
Much to ponder there Decebal, thanks for the post.