Invisible Gorillas! A study on Inattentional Blindness Noah Seltzer and Sebastian Peng Robert Alexander McMath Secondary Floor Location: M118H

Inattentional Blindness (n): the failure to notice a fully visible but unexpected object, event or detail because some attention was engaged on another task, event or object.

We started this project with the full knowledge that other people had done it and have made conclusions on the subject of Inattentional Blindness. However, we were hoping to make our own conclusions based on which age groups or job types experience this phenomenon more or less than others. This is, to the best of our knowledge, an unexplored avenue. Cell phones are found to cause more cases of inattentional blindness, which lead to the recent cell phone ban. And not just driving, recent studies also show that people can miss any kind of event doing something as simple as walking with a cell phone. Our study, which gives credit to a video made by Daniel Simons, shows that people can miss important events in something as simple as watching a video.

The video we used demonstrated inattentional blindness by showing two teams. We told every person watching to count the number of passes made by the team in white. Halfway through the video a man wearing a gorilla costume walks across the screen and thumps his chest in the middle of the playing field before walking off. We fully expected more than half of the people tested to miss this Gorilla, not only because the gorilla suit is black whereas the people they are told to watch are dressed in white, but because people in general tend to miss events happening in plain sight because of inattentional blindness when they are focusing on another task.

We first set up the age groups so that we could get an accurate snapshot of Inattentional blindness in developing stages of the human life. We tested people so that we could get 5 people per group. This included some groups that were a two year demographic such as 8 – 10, 11 – 13, 14 – 16 and 17 – 19. After the age of 20, we created the rest of our age demographics in groups of 5. The purpose of creating these small groups was to accurately pinpoint development stages in the human life and from there draw conclusions about where the trends of people missing details existed. We later changed this too four unequal larger age demographics we realized that 5 people per group was a small thing to base a conclusion about an entire group on. With this new chart setup, there was an extremely noticeable trend.

The four groups fit a bell curve, with the trend line of people who noticed the gorilla dipping at the youth section, staying at its highest throughout the young adult and middle age groups and dipping once again in the seniors groups. The conclusion that we can come to is quite clear. A person can notice details much more clearly during the middle of your life.