Comments on: If You Can’t Notice a Gorilla in Plain Sight, How Can You Testify as a Witness?

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 07:30:36 +0000

Fyi people, this experiment is impossible to be done correctly when you know the gorilla is coming. I read and knew it was coming. But when the video was played in my psych class without background information, the majority of us missed the gorilla.

By: Wang-Lo

Wang-Lo — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:28:12 +0000

First time through, I lost track of the number of passes and didn’t notice the gorilla either. I spent most of the time watching the sexy girl in the yellow bikini.

-Wang-Lo.

By: TRJc

TRJc — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:05:38 +0000

It is significant that both the gorilla and the unimportant players wore black. Repeat the experiment with the instruction to count the passes by the players wearing black and people will notice the gorilla. Or substitute for the gorilla a person dressed as a polar bear, and again count the passes by the players wearing white. Whenever the animal suit is the same color as the significant players, it will be noticed. Whenever the animal suit is the same color as the unimportant players, it will mostly not be noticed. Perhaps the most interesting would be to repeat the experiment with players wearing white and yellow. In this case the gorilla would neither belong to the important color, nor the unimportant color, but to a third color.

By: Jim G.

Jim G. — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:39:06 +0000

Did anyone notice how many times the players in black passed the ball? Of course not! The issue is not the lack of awareness to what is going on but of focus and concentration on what has been determined to be important. Why was the police officer running past the beating? Was he out jogging for exercise or chasing after someone who just committed murder? Ignore the instructions about the video and just watch it. You will notice the gorilla. Anyone will.

By: Patrick F

Patrick F — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:27:11 +0000

I’ve seen the video twice in psychology classes. Even having seen it, if I’m counting passes as directed, I miss the gorilla despite KNOWING it’s there. I can easily believe the cop missed the beating.

By: Our Fathers, Ourselves & Much More | Red Weather Review

Our Fathers, Ourselves & Much More | Red Weather Review — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:04:42 +0000

[...] So much for your eyewitness! Psychologist Daniel Simons (The Invisible Gorilla) on the mismatch between what we see and what we think we see. Here. [...]

By: Brian Too

Brian Too — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:45:01 +0000

Magicians routinely manipulate our attention. It’s wrong to suggest that eyewitness testimony is inaccurate as a blanket assertion. However eyewitnesses are vulnerable to seeing what they expect to see, especially if they have been prepared in any way.

In the Penn and Teller documentary there was a fascinating section. One of the magicians (Penn?) wanted to know how one particular part of a trick worked. They couldn’t understand how an action taken in plain sight was never seen by the audience. The show noted that the action could be seen however, so long as the face of the magician was covered. Even though this was not the primary focus of the audience!

Somehow the experience of being directly looked at by the magician steals some of our attention.

By: Yes man

Yes man — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:47:08 +0000

Did you repeat this with counting passes from black players? The gorilla is black too. Test subjects just don’t register black guys?

By: If You Can’t Notice a Gorilla in Plain Sight, How Can You Testify as a Witness? - Association for Psychological Science

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:45:55 +0000

[...] If You Can’t Notice a Gorilla in Plain Sight, How Can You Testify as a Witness? [...]

By: floodmouse

floodmouse — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:27:47 +0000

The more you micro-focus on a specific task, the less aware you are of other things going on around you. When I was in grade school, I could concentrate on reading a book to the extent that I wouldn’t hear people speak to me, and they assumed I was snubbing them. I learned this was a bad idea in public. Ironically, people who have less ability to micro-focus (or who aren’t using it) might be more likely to notice gorilla.

On a tangent, there was a documentary featuring the stage illusionists Penn and Teller, who demonstrated how easy it is to draw someone’s eyes away from an object coming out of the magician’s sleeve. Once your attention is directed to the relevant portion of the screen, it’s easy to see, but unless you know it’s coming, your eyes will be drawn to a different part of the frame. I think this was a “Nova” documentary about how the brain works, but maybe that is my memory playing tricks on me.

“Our assumptions lead us to trust confident testimony about memories (‘That’s the guy who robbed me. I’m sure of it.’) when decades of research on memory, such as the great work by people like Elizabeth Loftus, reveals its fallibility. ” – Another example from my personal experience: I was the third car in a minor three-car collision. The three cars were traveling in the same direction at a slow speed, and my car was low to the ground behind the other two cars. I told the police officer that I thought the girl in front of me failed to brake because I didn’t see her brake lights, and I believed she struck the front car first–but I correctly pointed out that I couldn’t be SURE if she struck the front car first, because from my vantage point, I could not see the front bumper of her car. The girl in question simply told the police officer, definitively and confidently, that I hit her first, causing her to slide into the other car. The police office accepted her version of the story without investigating further. In the absence of a video camera or corroborating evidence, I will never be any surer of what really happened than I was that day when I admitted my ignorance. I just wonder what would have happened if I had very confidently assured the police officer that the girl in front of me was responsible for the accident, without bringing up the little matter of what I was ACTUALLY able to see in the field of vision from my rather low-slung front seat.