R Simons, Chabris (1999)

Question 1

what is change blindness?

Answer 1

refers to the surprising difficulty observers have in noticing large changes to visual scenes/ failure to detect an object that has moved or disappeared

Question 2

what is in attentional blindness?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

what was the aim of this study?

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

how many p’s were there?

Answer 4

228 participants and they were almost all undergraduate students

Question 5

what was the sample?

Answer 5

a volunteer sample

Question 6

what was the reward for participating?

Answer 6

no compensation, just received a large candy bar

Question 7

where did the study take place?

Answer 7

Harvard University

Question 8

what happened to some p’s?

Answer 8

36 p’s were discarded so results were used from 192 p’s who were equally distributed across the 16 conditions

Question 9

what what was the research method?

Answer 9

lab experiment

Question 10

what was the experimental design?

Answer 10

independent measures design

Question 11

what was the IV?

Answer 11

whether the p’s took part in:
transparent umbrella woman condition
transparent gorilla condition
opaque umbrella woman condiiton
or the opaque gorilla condition

Question 12

how many conditions were there?

Answer 12

16

Question 13

what were the four displays for each of the four task conditions

Answer 13

white easy
white hard
black easy
black hard

Question 14

what was the DV ?

Answer 14

the number of p’s in each 16 conditions who noticed the unexpected event

Question 15

what were the video tapes described?

Answer 15

recordings of the same actors and were recorded of the same day in the same location

Question 16

how long were the videos ?

Answer 16

75 seconds

Question 17

what did the video show?

Answer 17

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

Question 18

what did the players do?

Answer 18

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 …

Question 19

what could they do with the ball?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

what happened after 44-48 seconds ?

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

how long did the unexpected event last?

Answer 21

5 seconds and the basketball players played the WHOLE time

Question 22

what was the transparent conditions?

Answer 22

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

Question 23

what was the procedure?

Answer 23

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)

Question 24

results

Answer 24

• 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%)

Question 25

what did they conclude?

Answer 25

• the level of in attentional blindness depends on the difficulty of the primary task
• objects can pass through the spatial event of attentional focus and still not be seen if they aren’t being attended to