A video from a cognitive psychologist is meant to see how good people are at mental multitasking.
Daniel Simons’s test is called “The Monkey Business Illusion.”
The test was based on a previous study that showed that when people were asked to focus on a video of people passing basketballs, about half of them totally missed a person wearing a gorilla suit walking in and out of the scene.
Simons wanted to use the infamy of the invisible gorilla to his advantage, creating a similar video that asked for the same results from the audience.
“A lot of people seem to take the message of our original gorilla study to be that people don’t pay enough attention to what is happening around them, and that by paying more attention and ‘expecting the unexpected,’ we will be able to notice anything important,” Simons told Live Science.
“The new experiment shows that even when people know that they are doing a task in which an unexpected thing might happen, that doesn’t suddenly help them notice other unexpected things.”
Once people find the first thing they’re looking for, “they often don’t notice other things,” Simons added. “Our intuitions about what we will and won’t notice are often mistaken.”
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