If you watch the video you will be asked to partake in a super quick memory test.
Please, do not read the rest of this article until you have seen the video.
So, how well did you do?
A lot of people tend to struggle when they attempt this type of memory task due to the Inattentional blindness, which is also known as perceptual blindness.
Mack and Rock published a paper on this phenomenon in 1992 and they are also the people who came up with the term.
As I mentioned in the video this isn’t a real blindness where the eyes stop working, it’s simply that the information that is deemed not to be important is not given any mental attention.
In any given situation our senses are bombarded with a great deal of information. Even taking one single sense such as sight can produce an overwhelming array of data. Therefore, when we are presented with a focused searching criterion it allows us to make sense of the mass of data and find the parts we are looking for.
This highlights the sought after items and the rest of the ‘unrequired’ information (in this case visual) is ignored or not given and significance.
However, there are four main theories of what causes inattentional blindness; perceptual load, inattentional amnesia, expectation and perceptual cycle. If you want to know more about each of the theories then your favourite search engine will be your friend. But make sure you don’t get too focused on searching for the theories otherwise you might miss some data due to what I am writing about in this very article!
Something else to check out
One of the best known experiments that demonstrate innatentional blindness is the ‘Invisible Gorilla Test’. If you haven’t seen this, I guess the ‘cat is out of the bag’ so to speak, but still type it in to a video search engine and you will be rewarded with the video.
If you have enjoyed this article and video in any way it would be great if you could show your appreciation by leaving me a comment, even just a ‘thank you’ would be great.
