Science · Attention · 1999
The Gorilla in the Pass
Observers count basketball passes and miss a person in a gorilla suit. Attention is not a lamp on the whole room.
- Harvard, of the 1999 report
- Late 1990s laboratory
- 42.37°N 71.12°W
Plate · Generated interpretation
Count something on the plate. What did you decline to count?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28 (1999). Subjects count passes in a video. Many never see the gorilla. The finding is a rate of misses, not a metaphysics of the unseen.
Simons and Chabris 1999, Perception 28: 1059–1074. DOI 10.1068/p281059. Neisser’s earlier ballgame work is a parent. Mack and Rock named inattentional blindness.
Cherry’s listeners dropped a second voice. These observers drop a walk-on in full view. The two experiments rhyme. They are not one mechanism proved twice.
About half the observers in the famous condition miss the gorilla. The number is the finding. “You would have seen it if you had looked” is not the finding.
Whether the miss is a failure of seeing or a success of selection is the live argument.
Distant echoes
Echo
Mid-century laboratory · Imperial College, London
Two ears, one name
Cherry asked what happens to the voice you do not take. Simons and Chabris asked what happens to the figure you did not task yourself to take.
One question remains
Attention · What enters awareness?
If you can look at a scene and not have the gorilla, what, exactly, was in view?