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selective attention test

Daniel Simons

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YouTube
  • Recommended by 3 people, in Hacker News, across 3 different months.
  • Presented by Daniel Simons, as the video describes them

For anyone, no background needed. Education, not medical advice.

34M views16 years ago3 recommendations

Brain and nervesNeuroscienceMemory and learning

Daniel Simons demonstrates the phenomenon of inattentional blindness through the famous selective attention basketball passing test.

The original, world-famous awareness test from Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. Get our new book, *** Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It *** available July 11, 2023. Learn more and order from Basic Books, Amazon, or your favorite local bookstore. For more information, go to hachettebookgroup.com/titles/daniel-simons/nobodys-fool/9781…

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a classic and eye-opening demonstration of how human selective attention works.

crispyambulancein Hacker News • Recommends

On “A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Surviving on the Roads”

This is sound advice. The only time I've made contact with a moving car as a cyclist was when I was going past an off-ramp. The weird thing was that I thought the driver "saw me". It was late morning, no problem with visibility. From my POV, she was looking right at me. In fact, she was looking "through" me. She simply was expecting other cars and a person on a bike was not what she was looking for. Human attention is very much selective. Check out this shocking video: link to this video After that, I ride with a bright flashing headlight at all times, even daylight. It gives some measure of protection, I think.
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chrisweeklyin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Lethal memory fail: Why drivers see, and then forget motorcyclists”

As a motorcyclist -- and lifelong learner w/ a degree in cognitive psychology -- I really appreciate demonstrations like this one^1 from Daniel Simons. It's a short video (< 90s), but for many first-time viewers, it's an eye-opening experience. ^1. link to this video Edit: just saw @elosarv's link to a longer but more relevant "motorcycle invisibility training" video ( link
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meowsterin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Massachusetts 'Reviewing' Kei Car Ban After Uproar over Canceled Registrations”

It's called Selective Attention which explained in another comment: > Notably, people tend to see what they expect to see. > When they are looking for cars, they tend not to see motorcycles, even when they are in plain view. Watch/take this Selective Attention test (1 min 22 sec): link to this video
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qjacobin Psychology & Neuroscience Stack Exchange • Mentions

On “What is a effective and interactive exercise to demonstrate cognition to a class”

I would recommend something like the Invisible Gorilla! This is a classic demonstration from Simons & Chabris (1999) that demonstrates the selectivity of attention. Demonstrating "cognition" is a bit broad, but this is a famous example of the ways in which cognitive processes select, omit, and process information. Video of the illusion (with instructions) here: link to this video NPR story discussing the experiment/illusion in simple terms: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126977945
3View on Stack Exchange

brisancein Hacker News • Mentions

On “Multitasking”

However, the argument that multitasking on computers is bad because humans can’t multitask is flawed. That was right in the article itself. I believe the author's point is that focus/attention is more important than being able to "multi-task". Refer to Daniel Simons's experiment (the invisible gorilla) on selective attention. link to this video
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Someonein Hacker News • Mentions

On “Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death”

I am not sure we even know that normal consciousness is continuous. We experience it that way, but that says nothing. We think our vision is continuous, too, but it isn't ( link to this video . More info at link (had to use a shortener because the URL gives information away for those who don't know this experiment))
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cooper12in Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Canvas Made of Pixels”

Your video reminded me of this selective attention test: link to this video . This Wikipedia article also seems to be related to the phenomenon and talks about the video too: link .
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JadeNBin Hacker News • Mentions

On “At The Dawn Of Recorded Sound, No One Cared”

> The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. This seems like (from their point of view) the Blub paradox ( link ), and (from our point of view) something of its converse. From their point of view, they couldn't see the importance of sound recording because they didn't have any existing mechanisms to make use of it. From our point of view, we can't not see the importance of sound recording, because we have so many ways of making use of it. (Kind of like how, once you know the effect being demonstrated in link to this video , you not only no longer experience it, but find it hard to believe that you ever did.)
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tmh88jin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]”

> You see a handful of lines and text across the screen and it's sufficient to make you go ":o"? Enough to conclude it must be better than a brain? I think he's referring to selective attention. Can't comment on the validity of this "study", but I recall it catching me off guard the first time I saw it. link to this video
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jfimin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]”

Oh definitely. The selective attention test 0 really shows how humans can perceive certain things in a way that's different from how computers perceive them. The research on GANs also shows how computers can be fooled by things that wouldn't confuse humans. 0 link to this video
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aaron695in Hacker News • Mentions

On “Drivers new to level 2 driving assistance had lower awareness of on-road events”

The moonwalking bear/gorilla comes to mind for this. Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events - link to this video / link But I'm not sure what that means, is it good or bad to see the bear. You are driving not looking at pretty things. You want to reduce dimensions. It's a 1 tonne vehicle, color shouldn't matter.
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digitalengineerin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why do people not notice our enormous, prominent, clear and contrasting banner?”

Yes. Eyetracking is rather useless as what we see depends on the task we have to perform. We filter out what we don't need and don't even register it consciously. As such, general eye tracking studies can only tell you so much... Case in point: dancing gorilla awareness test, link to this video .
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sankyoin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Invisibility Training for Motorcyclists [video]”

This old psychology video comes to mind. link to this video Also, in San Francisco a lot of the "paint" in the crosswalks is little plastic pellets melted. I have had my rear wheel slide out going over the thick white crosswalk bars. Best to keep off the throttle and roll over them. Same for the giant metal plates they use to cover up ongoing construction projects. They can be very slippery.
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BoppreHin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Three Things That LLMs Have Made Us Rethink”

> it doesn't understand its own limitations, ie it has no self awareness. And how much self awareness do humans have, exactly? We walk around with heads filled with false memories1, accidentally ignore surprisingly prominent stimuli2, and struggle to understand things as simple as material color3. And people are mostly unaware of these limitations, or those examples would not be considered surprising! I think we plan around the limitations we observe, not our real limitations. If that's the case, then LLMs simply lack training data to notice those limitations. 1 link 2 link to this video (old selective attention test) 3 link
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JieJiein Hacker News • Mentions

On “The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input”

Sure, but does it pass the Selective Attention Test? link to this video (I don't know, I don't have access.)
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Retr0idin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Chess puzzle, but you are what you capture”

Yup, you can't move to them. Weirdly I didn't notice them at all until several attempts in (and was getting confused as to why certain moves weren't allowed), in a way that reminded me of the Selective Attention Test0. Once I'd clocked them I was able to solve it pretty quickly. 0 link to this video
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