Simons comparatively investigated visual inattentional blindness. (Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001) (Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events.) In his study participants were told to watch a video. In the video students in wearing black and white T-shits were passing basketballs with each other. The participants were told to count the number of passes between players wearing white shirts. During the video a human in a gorilla suit randomly walk by. This gorilla which is so unexpected in the video and which is so visible for the participants was very often left unnoticed. Participants failed to notice the gorilla due to un focused attention to extraneous objects. Participants were paying attention only on white shirted players in the video. What is unknown and still studied is what causes these limitations to our perception whether they are due to failures of our perception attention or memory. “It is a well-known phenomenon that we do not notice anything happening in our surroundings while being absorbed in the inspection of something; focusing our attention on a certain object may happen to such an extent that we cannot perceive other objects placed in the peripheral parts of our visual field…” -Rezsö Bálint 1907
What Bálint is telling us is that when being focused on a certain task or object we tend to ignore the principal aspects of the visual world around us.
Haines studied inattentional blindness in the capabilities of pilots (Richard F. Haines. A Presbyopia Research, A Breakdown in Simultaneous Information Processing, 1991)
Richard attempted to investigate the ability of pilots to detect accurately information especially at focus was when there were two sources of superimposed visual information.
Stimulators were programmed in similar ways as the Boeing model 272 turbojet airplane. The participants were pilots themselves and on top of that each of them had undergone intensive familiarization to the flight simulator (NASA Ames Research Center fixed base flight simulator). Therefore all participants were fully aware of the mechanics and how to operate the simulator itself. Each pilot was to land the aircraft in the simulation. When the pilots attempted to land the aircraft they were distracted at the end as another aircraft was placed on the landing lane. Resulting into a crash during landing. The results thus showed shockingly how the pilots were fully unaware of the other plane along the landing lane because of their attention being focused so much on landing procedures. Pilots when landing were concerned with two main areas of information and these are the external view through the windshield and the instrument panel. The study raised interesting questions of the capabilities of pilots processing visual information.
In this study based on the previous researches on the dependency of attention to visual perception it can be predicted that the participant of this study would similarly be affected by attention in failing to notice anomalies within the experiment.
Research Hypothesis (H1): Participants will fail to notice the anomalous objects in the picture due to inattentional blindness.
Null hypothesis (H0): Participants will notice the anomalies within the picture under observation.
2.0 Method:
2.1 Design:
This experiment requires the use of independent samples. The method used in this experiment is experimental method. A group of elementary school students and another group of high school students are used in this experiment. The independent measures design was used because the subjects have to participate in one condition only making them more naïve to the test. The independent variable was the task or no task that was either given or not given to the participants. The dependent variable was the amount of anomalies noticed by the participants within the photo. This was a single-blind experiment, since the participants were unaware of the hypothesis where as the researchers conducting the experiment did. This was one way of controlling extraneous variable, demand characteristic. Use of non-laboratory conditions such as school environment was another way of controlling an extraneous variable, artificiality. Informed consent was obtained from both groups of participants and later on were debriefed after the study. Ethical consideration was taken into account. During the performance of the task, it was made sure that the participants were not emotionally or physically harmed.
2.2 Participants:
Each independent sample had 20 participants. Informed consent forms were not necessary as all participants were over 16 years of age. All Finnish speaking pupils. First group of participants were aged between 16-18. Second group of participants were aged 16-17. The participants were sample of opportunity, since they were all in classes whose teachers had agreed to have students participating. A risky extraneous variable affecting the results with each participant was individual difference. As certain participants may like or dislike drawing based on personal skills. Which may have caused random confounding effects. Especially participants in group B were selected due to their age and naïve nature with psychology and psychological testing. To prevent participants from working out the aim of the study and behaving differently (trying to outwit the experimenter by noticing all anomalies in the photo).
2.3 Materials:
- Standardized instructions for each group (see appendix…)
- Informed consent forms (see appendix…)
- Debriefing notes (see appendix...)
- Photo of kitchen (see appendix…)
2.4 Procedure:
High school participants (from Tikkurila lukio) were categorized into group A and the upper secondary school students (from Jokiniemen ylä-aste) into group B.
In group A each participant was experimented independently. Each student followed the researcher into another classroom. Where the standardized instructions (appendix) were read to each participant. The participant was given 1min time to observe the photo. After which they were asked to sketch the photo on the paper provided to them based on their memory.
Group B conducted the same procedure however in addition participants were asked to count the amount of dishes visible in the photo. Then write down the number of dishes onto the same paper with the sketch.
3.0 Results
The results as shown in (appendix) demonstrate how the participants from group A noticed more of the anomalous objects than in group B. Group A without the task had a higher average of noticed anomalies than group B which included dish counting task.
The following pie charts demonstrate the difference between the two groups. It is clearly seen how chart 1.0 has a smaller percentage of participant who noticed the anomalous objects. Where as Group B whom had the task had a bigger percentage of participants that did not notice anomalous objects. Clearly making it evident that the dish counting task had its effect on the induction inattentional blindness.
Chart 1.0
Chart 1.1
Another interesting result which was not expected was gained from Group B. With which it became evident that the number of dishes noticed in the photo was higher than the actual amount of dishes. (see Appendix) Table shows that the average number of dishes seen was 17 when the actual amount was only 14. This peculiar phenomena may have its own reasons for evoking. And may have had its effect on the examined inattentional blindness of this experiment.
4.0 Discussion
As the average number of noticed anomalies in group A and group B were affected by the task given on not given it can be concluded that the results of this investigation are consistent with the results of studies by Simons et al. and Richard F. Haines.
The term inattentional blindness itself is the name for the failure in detecting the presence of a highly visible stimulus when engaging in an attention-demanding task. It is important to take account of all possible causations for inattentional blindness. The most important factors based on the two experiments are attention, schema, priming, and awareness. The most highlighted reason having an effect on such disabilities to notice anomalies is attention. Attention is critical for perceptual awareness. If we are not attending to a particular information in our vision then it is not consequently ‘seen’. The most important topic to attend is the link between attention and consciousness or perception and attention. Participants in group A and B showed that they neither perceived or were aware of the anomalies within the photo. Participants were as if blind to these anomalies in the photo although they were highly visible.
Yet attention is not the only focus at this stage. Not only did attention affect the participants reactions to the photos also schematic models affected the way participants notices anomalies. Participants have perceived information about the visual scene, which is familiar to them. Previously they have established a schema for this visual scene for the type of objects that belong in the perceived scene. Participants whom have a schema of a kitchen. Each individual may attain a personal attention set based on own schema of the scene. As the process of attaining to new information of the scene the schema is enriched. However the question is what happens when an anomalous cue appears in the scene? There are two possible answers to this question. The observer may either notice the anomaly due to disrupted sustained attention or not notice it due to the previous schema set of the kitchen.
Bibliography
Julian E. Hochberg, Mary A. Peterson, Barbara Gillam, H. A. Sedgwick (2007). In the Mind's Eye: Julian Hochberg on the Perception of Pictures, Films, and the World Oxford University Press, New York
Charles L. Folk, Bradley S. Gibson (2001). Attraction, Distraction and Action: Multiple Perspectives on Attentional Capture North Holland, Amsterdam
5.0 Appendix
5.1 Instructions
(Before Experiment)
Hello everyone,
I am Erika Pärn. Me and my assistant Neha Sarin are studying psychology in the IB programme in Tikkurilan lukio. Today we will be conducting a psychological research studying perception and we need voluntary participants for this experiment.
Group A.
I will show a photograph of a kitchen. You will receive one minute time to look at the picture and calculate the amount of dishes in the kitchen. After which you will write down the number of dishes .
(In Native language)
Näytän teille valokuvan keittiöstä. Teillä on minuutti aikaa tutkia kuvaa sekä laskea astioiden lukumäärä keittiössä. Jonka jälkeen kirjoitatte keittiö tarvikkeiden lukumäärän paperille jonka annan teille.
Group B.
I will show a photo of a kitchen which you will be able to observe. Afterwhich you will draw onto your piece of paper a sketch of the photo. You will receive 1 minute time.
(In Native language)
Näytän teille valokuvan keittiöstä jota voitte katsella. Tämän jälkeen piirrätte paperillenne luonnoksen kuvasta. Aikaa on minuutin verran.
(After Experiment)
The idea behind this experiment was to investigate how visual memory depends on attention. The group that received the simultaneous dish task interfered attention being payed on the photo and its anomalies.
(In Native language)
Kokeen ideana oli tutkia kuinka visuaalinen muisti rippuu huomiointi kykyyn. Ryhmä jolle annoin samanaikaisen tehtävän tuloksissa huomataan kuinka tehtävä sekaantuu huomionti kyvyn kanssa ja näin vaikuttaa siihen kuinka osallistuja huomaa poikkeavia esineitä keittiössä.
5.2 Debriefing
(In Native language)
Kiitos osallistumisesta minun kokeeseeni. Olette vapaaehtoisia ja voitte keskeyttää kokeenne million tahansa tunnette sen tarpeelliseksi. Kokeen tulokset pysyvät nimettöminä. Tuloksia ei julkaista missään julkisilla sivustoilla tai lehdissä. Vielä kerran kiitos, että osallistutte kokeeseeni.
Thankyou for participating in this experiment. You are volunteers and may interrupt the experiment any time when you feel the need to. The results of the experiment will remain anonymous. The results will not be published in any public sites or articles. Once again thankyou for your participation in my experiment.
5.3 Raw Data
5.4 Significance Test
Wilcoxson rank sum test was used to test the sigificance if the difference between group A and B was significant. In this significance test sum of the ranks are compared and the smaller of these is T. Thus the value of T is 210
According to the table the critical value of T in the wilcoxson rank sum test for one tailed test is 315 with a level of significance 0,5%. Thus the null hyposthesis can safely rejected and hypothesis 1 accepted with a risk of 0,5%.
,
NX= number of participants in group X,
NY= number of participants in group Y and
RX= the total of the ranking values for group X.
For group A:
UA= 610-206=404
For group B:
UB= 610- 210= 400
The calculated value of UA is 404. The calculated value of UB is 400.The smaller of them is the calculated value of U:
U=400
The critical value of U for a one-tailed test at the significance level of 0,5% is .... The calculated value of U was compared to the critical value. As 400 was smaller than ..., the null-hypothesis can be rejected by the risk of 0,5%.
5.5 Photo of Kitchen
