He lies like an eyewitness
The perils of inattentional blindness
The mind’s ability to concentrate on complex patterns is remarkably powerful. Watch this video, carefully counting how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball.
How many passes did you see? The correct answer is 15.
What do you see?
I’m driving on a track at a tactical vehicle operations course. An instructor sits on the passenger side of the back seat, silently watching. With one eye on the speedometer, we’re both aware of the exercise minimum of 40 mph; dropping below that speed at any time results in automatic failure.
Approaching the blind curve of turn three, I use the last of the straightaway to settle the car’s speed just shy of 45 mph. Entering the left-hand curve, I accelerate ever so gently. I feel the center of gravity of the car shift rearward, pushing the grip of the tires into the turn. I lean slightly forward, trying to peer ahead of the trees obscuring the road ahead.
A scene pops into view up ahead to the right, and I key the radio handset held in my hand against the car seat to keep it out of view from the outside. This is Bravo one, exiting turn three. There are two people standing next to a vehicle against the tree line on the southwest corner of the field. It’s a blue, two-door pickup truck. The figure closest to the truck may have something in his right hand.
I accelerate out of the turn, glancing quickly at my speed (50 mph, safe, though a little too fast), and begin to anticipate the curve of turn four which will provide a better, closer, angle to see what the person’s holding. Key the mic again. The two figures appear to be men, both in jeans and coats. One black coat, one orange. The person holding the object is wearing a gray baseball cap. The person’s hands come into clear view.
Suddenly, thip! thip! thip! Several paintballs explode against my door and window, streaming angry orange pink paint towards the rear of the car. I was so intently watching the figures by the truck, I failed to see the third man with a rifle running to a barricade 30 feet off to the left side of the road.
I am dead.
What do you see?
As it turns out, evolution has gifted our minds with a particular skill in focusing intensely on things we feel important, for whatever reason: threat, need, reward. So much so that you’d be forgiven to have missed the woman in the gorilla suit. If that makes no sense – what in the hell is Pete talking about? – go back and watch the video at the beginning of this post.
Don’t be upset if you missed it – roughly half of the observers shown the video in a study conducted by researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris did as well. Their study discusses the idea of inattentional blindness, a concept which “suggest[s] that we perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive focused attention.”
In a later study, Simons, Chabris, and Adam Weinberger examined a case where
“a Boston police officer chasing a suspect ran past a brutal assault and was prosecuted for perjury when he claimed not to have seen it...We simulated the Boston incident by having subjects run after a confederate along a route near which three other confederates staged a fight. At night only 35% of subjects noticed the fight; during the day 56% noticed. We manipulated the attentional load on the subjects and found that increasing the load significantly decreased noticing.”
There is a Russian saying, врет, как очевидец, which roughly translates to someone “lying like an eyewitness.” There is a certainty we assign to what we witness with our own eyes: I saw it. My experience interviewing groups of people who witnessed the same event – things like a bank robbery, or Richard Reid’s attempt to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean – reinforces the idea that eyewitness recollection is both varied and frequently certain, far more than it should be.
What do you see?
At the top, I see a picture of a pleasant but unremarkable fall background in western Maryland, which I might have quickly glanced past to get to the substance of this post. Looking closer, simply in front of my feet? A world of unnoticed and unexplored detail.
What do you know, from what you see? That’s for a later post.
Excellent use of the professor’s video. There was another example (can’t post images) of radiologists examining a lung x-ray to detect nodules. There was a small gorilla (what is with gorillas?) embedded that I think 75% never saw. Actually, eye scans showed most of these experts paused on and saw the gorilla, but their focus was not to scan but detect specific patterns. They saw it, but it wasn’t related to the task, so the hierarchy of their brains dismissed the otherwise interesting detail into the subconscious.
Fascinating. I failed, I counted only 13 passes twice, and because I was hyper focused on the white shirted person passes I missed the gorilla suit entirely. What our brains filter & perceive can indeed be varied.