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Here's a story that may hold interest for those of us who believe it is advantageous to question our perceptions - and more importantly, our faith in the accuracy of our perception vis-a-vis our susceptibility to being tricked. The experiments also call into question the conclusions we draw from our perceived and recalled experience.
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A gorilla in the midst: how our brains deceive us
May 8, 2004
Science is beginning to understand mayhem and mishap in everyday life, Roger Highfield writes in London.
Look around, and you could be forgiven for believing that you can see a vivid and detailed picture of your surroundings.
Indeed, you may even think that your eyes never deceive you. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your brain.
Scientists have gathered some remarkable evidence that shows it is possible to see something without observing it, in research that sheds new light on traffic accidents that occur when a driver "looked but failed to see".
The amazing lack of attention we pay to our surroundings has been highlighted by researchers Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University.
In one experiment, people who were walking across a college campus were asked by a stranger for directions. During the resulting chat, two men carrying a wooden door passed between the stranger and the subjects. After the door went by, the subjects were asked if they had noticed anything change.
Half of those tested failed to notice that, as the door passed by, the stranger had been substituted with a man who was of different height, of different build and who sounded different. He was also wearing different clothes.
Although the subjects had talked to the stranger for 10 to 15 seconds before the swap, half of them did not detect that, after the passing of the door, they had ended up speaking to a different person. This phenomenon, called change blindness, highlights how we see much less than we think we do.
Dr Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams. Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though the hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.
However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.
In the past few days, two teams have reported complementary studies that underline our limited capacity to hold a visual scene in short-term memory, such as a passing gorilla, revealing how our "visual scratch pad" is controlled by a region of the brain, about the size of a 20 cent coin, called the posterior parietal cortex, near the back of the head.
The studies were published in the journal Nature by Dr Edward Vogel and Dr Maro Machizawa of the University of Oregon. Subjects are good at recalling all of the objects in scenes containing four or fewer objects but frequently make mistakes describing displays containing a larger number of objects.
"Though we have the impression we are taking in a great deal of information from a visual scene, we are actually very poor at describing its contents in detail once it is gone from our sight," the researchers said.
In the case of the door experiment, it seems the limited visual short-term memory capacity of the subjects meant they did not retain enough details to spot that they were talking to a new person.
This memory limitation could contribute to traffic accidents because it "allows us to maintain and monitor information about the objects - other cars, bicyclists, pedestrians - in our immediate vicinity so we can avoid colliding with them", said Dr Vogel.
"It seems highly plausible that racing drivers have higher short-term memory capacity than normal drivers which would allow them to monitor more cars."
As far as our brains are concerned, the studies suggest the adage "out of sight, out of mind" may be true.
The Telegraph, London
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