Selective Attention Test

"This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness: Among people counting passes in the white t-shirt team, about 90 per cent – including me, when I first saw this – completely miss the gorilla. The phenomenon is a whole field of research in psychology nowadays. Why do people miss very obvious, highly-salient events? Under what conditions does this happen more than in other conditions? For example, if people are counting the black shirt passers, the chances of spotting the gorilla are increased, because there is more similarity between the gorilla and the people in the black shirts. Inattentional blindness was known before this research. There had been several demonstrations of it going back for quite a few years. But many of them did it with very quick flashes of pictures that you had to do some task with, and in one of them there would be an extra element and you were asked if you saw it. And that works, but it’s a lot less interesting than a big gorilla walking across the screen for nine seconds, stopping in the middle to beat his chest, and people actually having to walk around it to pass the ball to each other. What was so interesting to me was how a really, really simple instruction can block out half of your visual world. Well, my first choice – the book Introducing Consciousness – dealt with the philosophical issue of how activity in a physical system can lead to something feeling like something. My second choice, the discussion of awareness in the vegetative state, looks at the issue of what it is about brain activity that defines our state of consciousness – whether we are conscious, not conscious, or something in between. This third choice, a demonstration of inattentional blindness, is about the content of our consciousness. We know that the brain can process a lot of things that it’s unaware of, for example words presented subliminally, too quickly to consciously see – we know there is something in our brain’s semantic system that can still process their meaning. There’s experimental evidence of that. The question is, in that case, what makes the distinction between the things that we see and become aware of, and the things that our eyes are exposed to but we remain unaware of? We walk around thinking our eyes are a bit like cameras, picking up the world around us and relaying whatever they see to the brain, and that what is relayed is what we’re aware of. But that’s simply not true. We remain unaware of a lot of what we see. And this is a pretty surprising or striking demonstration that gets that point across."