R Simons, Chabris (1999) Flashcards
(25 cards)
what is change blindness?
refers to the surprising difficulty observers have in noticing large changes to visual scenes/ failure to detect an object that has moved or disappeared
what is in attentional blindness?
when we are attentive to another object/task, we often fail to notice an unexpected object even if it appears at the point of fixation
what was the aim of this study?
- to investigate the effect of the unusual superimposition and ‘transparency’ of characters in the video used by Neisser would a more realistic video give similar or different findings
how many p’s were there?
228 participants and they were almost all undergraduate students
what was the sample?
a volunteer sample
what was the reward for participating?
no compensation, just received a large candy bar
where did the study take place?
Harvard University
what happened to some p’s?
36 p’s were discarded so results were used from 192 p’s who were equally distributed across the 16 conditions
what what was the research method?
lab experiment
what was the experimental design?
independent measures design
what was the IV?
whether the p’s took part in:
transparent umbrella woman condition
transparent gorilla condition
opaque umbrella woman condiiton
or the opaque gorilla condition
how many conditions were there?
16
what were the four displays for each of the four task conditions
white easy
white hard
black easy
black hard
what was the DV ?
the number of p’s in each 16 conditions who noticed the unexpected event
what were the video tapes described?
recordings of the same actors and were recorded of the same day in the same location
how long were the videos ?
75 seconds
what did the video show?
showed two teams of three players, one team in black t shirts and the other team in white t shirts. the players moved around in a relatively random fashion in an open area in front of a bank of three elevator doors
what did the players do?
the members of each team passed a standard orange basketball to one another in a standardised order player 1- player 2- player 3- player 1 …
what could they do with the ball?
passes were either dribbled or arial. players would also dribble the ball, wave their arms and make other movements consistent with their overall pattern of action
what happened after 44-48 seconds ?
either one of the expected events occurred: a tall woman holding an open umbrella walked from left to right of the camera , or in the gorilla condition, a shorter woman wearing a gorilla costume walked through left to right also.
how long did the unexpected event last?
5 seconds and the basketball players played the WHOLE time
what was the transparent conditions?
white team, black team and unexpected event were all filmed separately and were superimposed on each other in a way that each character was transparent
what was the procedure?
it was scripted and standardised
1. before viewing the tape, p’s were told they were watching a basketball game w two teams of three and that they should pay attention to either white team or black team.
2. they were told to keep either a silent mental count of the total passes made by attended team (easy condition) or a separate silent mental count of the number of bounce passes and the number of aerial passes made by attended team
3. after viewing the video tape p’s were immediately asked to write down their counts on paper
they were the asked additional q’s: ‘whilst counting did you notice anything unusual in the video?’ ‘did you notice anything other than the six players?’ and ‘did you see a gorilla/ woman carrying an umbrella walk across the screen?’
4. if they responded yes they were told to provide details of what they noticed, once they spoke about the unexpected events no more q’s were asked.
5. they were then asked if they had previously participated in a similar experiment before, if it was a yes their results were discarded (36 p’s)
results
- out of all 192 p’s, 54% noticed the unexpected event, 46% failed to notice
- more p’s noticed the unexpected event in the opaque conditions (67%) than the transparent conditions (42%)
- more p’s noticed the unexpected event in the easy task (64%) than the hard task (45%)
- the umbrella woman was noticed more than the gorilla (65% v 44%)
