Washington, July 21(ANI): When engaged in a demanding task, attention can act like a set of blinders, making it possible for stimuli to pass, undetected, right in front of our eyes, a new study has revealed.
The research conducted by Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston has found that what we become focused on becomes the centre of our world, and it shapes what we can and cannot see.
This is a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB).
Researchers have found that even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to inattentional blindness.
The researchers asked 24 radiologists to perform a familiar lung nodule detection task.
They examined five scans; each scan contained an average of 10 nodules. A gorilla, 48 times larger than the average nodule, was inserted in the last scan.
The researchers found that 83 percent of radiologists did not report seeing the gorilla.
With the help of Melissa Le-Hoa Vo, post-doctoral researcher at BWH, the researchers tracked the eye-movements of the radiologists and found that that the majority of those who missed the gorilla looked directly at it.
"The radiologists missed the gorillas not because they could not see them, but because the way their brains had framed what they were doing. They were looking for cancer nodules, not gorillas," Jeremy Wolfe, senior psychologist and director of the Visual Attention Laboratory at BWH, said.
The results suggest that even expert searchers typically only see what they are looking for, and are often unaware of the unexpected.
The study is published in the journal Psychological Science. (ANI)
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