SALT LAKE CITY -- University of Utah researchers say about half of us can become so involved in what we're doing that we miss the obvious events that flash in front of our eyes.
That's the foundation behind a new study called 'The Invisible Gorilla' experiment. The study asked 197 students aged 18 to 35 to watch a video where a group of people were passing a basketball to each other. The participants were supposed to count how many passes exchanged between the players wearing white t-shirts. During the sequence of the video, a person wearing a gorilla suit strolls across the scene, stops briefly, pounds his chest and walks off.
The study found that about 58 percent of participants were so intent on counting the passes between the players that they missed the gorilla.
Researchers found that the higher memory capacity you have, the more likely you are to see the gorilla.
"They can do the task and do it well and still have leftover resources to kind of monitor their environment," said Janelle Seegmiller, Lead author, University of Utah doctoral student in the Department of Psychology. "Somebody with lower memory capacity may do the task and may do it really well but it's taking up all of their resources that they have to do that task. And so they miss the gorilla." What does this mean for those of us not doing an experiment?
"You can think of it as your ability to deal with a lot of information and to process it and make decisions or make responses," said Seegmiller.
She says having skills like these can be especially impactful when we're doing serious tasks like driving.
"If you're driving and you're really focused on driving and you're doing that really, really well," said Seegmiller, "you still might miss unexpected events that can cause accidents."
Even on a rainy day or with inclement weather, researchers don't know yet how our attention is impacted. But they also say that even on a good day, drivers can still miss something dart out right in front of their eyes.
"Because people are so different in how well they can focus their attention, this may influence whether you'll see something you're not expecting," said Seegmiller.
Researchers tried similar tests on pilots.
"Pilots were crashing into planes on the runway because they were so focused on their screen in front of them," Seegmiller said.
Other researchers say because the human brain can only process so much, we need to pick and choose how much information to upload into our brains at a time.
"What are the cognitive costs of a cell phone, the cognitive costs of doing A, B or C in the car while you're driving?" Said study co-author Dr. Jason Watson, University of Utah, Department of Psychology. "This research really tells us that attention is limited, and so what we're really trying to do is explore the range of devices that may exert some sort of impact or cost in terms of our attention."
Seegmiller says it's just humanly impossible to process everything in our environment -- but if we know what causes our selective attention, we can mitigate some of what we miss when it counts.
The study will be published in the May issue of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
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