A couple of years ago, I wrote about a classic study in cognitive psychology (see my post, "Sometimes, we are blind to what is going on around us...") by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. There's a good chance that you've at least watched the video associated with the study, and perhaps you may have even read the book that Simons and Chabris wrote, called The Invisible Gorilla. They published their findings in the journal Perception in 1999 (see here). The study explored what Simons and Chabris called "inattentional blindness" - basically, we frequently fail to recognize or detect changes that in objects or scenes that are going on around us, which in some cases, leads us to completely and subconsciously ignore objects in our environment.
In this study (and if you've not heard of this study, please do me a favor and watch the video to perform the experiment yourself), subjects were asked to count the number of times in the video that players dressed in white passed a basketball back and forth to each other. It sounds easy enough, but I have shown this video on a number of occasions to others who have often miscounted the number of passes. What is surprising is that more than half of the time (in my experience), individuals fail to recognize that a gorilla walks across the screen about halfway through the video!
About ten years later, Simons repeated the same study, this time with a new twist. Even if you've already watched the video and know about the gorilla, do me another favor and watch the new video. Did you notice anything different? Now that you are "programmed" to see the gorilla in the video, you probably saw the gorilla clearly and easily. Did you notice that the number of players wearing black shirts decreased from three at the beginning to only two at the end of the video? Take another look at the video. Did you notice that the curtains changed colors (from red to gold)?
I've watched the original "Invisible Gorilla" countless times in the past, but I failed to notice either the curtain changing colors or the change in the number of players. There's a pretty good chance that you failed to notice these subtle changes too. Simons found (see study here) that even when 100% of the study subjects noticed the gorilla, only 11% of subjects noticed the curtain change and 16% noticed the change in the number of players. As Simons states, "Knowing that unexpected events might occur doesn't prevent you from missing unexpected events."
Okay, this is all very interesting, isn't it? It's even kind of fun! What is the real-world implication of all of this though? Well, apparently, on January 25, 1995, a Boston police officer named Kenny Conley was chasing a shooting suspect when he passed (and failed to notice) an active assault occurring on an undercover police officer. Apparently, while Conley was climbing a chain-link fence, an undercover officer named Michael Cox joined the chase. Another group of police officers had mistaken Cox for the suspect, assaulted him from behind, and brutally beat him. Conley claims that he ran right past the assault without noticing anything out of the ordinary. The subsequent investigation didn't believe Conley, and he was subsequently tried and convicted, serving about 4 months in jail for perjury.
Chabris and Simons noticed the similarities between this story and their "Invisible Gorilla" study and replicated the Conley-Cox case in the laboratory setting (see study here). They simulated the Boston incidents by having study subjects run past a staged fight. Only 35% of study subjects noticed the fight at night. During the day, just over half (56%) of the subjects noticed the fight! In other words, inattentional blindness is not just about gorillas - it has real-world implications and subsequently proved that Officer Conley's story was potentially true.
Bottom line. There is no such thing as multi-tasking. If you are focused on one particular task, there's a good chance that you will fail to perceive important cues or changes in your immediate environment. As I stated a few years ago in the original post, "If you ever find yourself in a situation where you are trying to multi-task, please remember that there are gorillas in our midst!" Alternatively, remember its all monkey business!
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