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Each of us has been a victim of our inattention at some point. An accident on the road, a wallet stolen from a bag, coffee stains on a new suit … And how many interesting things we lose sight of! Why we do not notice what is happening right under our noses, says cognitive psychologist Maria Falikman.
It seems to us that we see and hear everything that happens around us. This conviction, which has been called the «Great Illusion of Consciousness», has attracted the attention of psychologists, philosophers, and physiologists in recent decades. It’s no secret that we don’t notice a lot. For example, our inattention is actively used by magicians and pickpockets. In 2008, even a special direction was designated — «neuromagic», which answers the question of why we are convinced that we see everything. The question is what we do not notice and why it happens.
In psychology, attention gaps began to be addressed in the 1970s. These studies arose as a by-product of the study of visual perception. Ulric Neisser, the founder of cognitive psychology, wanted to prove that there are no special filters in our visual perception that retain important information and discard everything unnecessary. It is enough for us to know what we are monitoring, and we will do it effectively. For this, an experiment was conducted: the audience was shown the game of two basketball teams and asked to follow the ball passes. On the whole, the majority of the audience coped with this task successfully. Neisser introduced an additional condition: during the game on the screen, a girl under an umbrella passed from corner to corner. It was a stimulus, unrelated to what was happening, but still quite noticeable. It turned out that if a person is not loaded with a task, this stimulus is read by him. If there is a task (for example, to monitor the passes that team members give to each other), the person most likely will not notice this event.
- Consume information consciously
This phenomenon has been termed «inattentional blindness». If we are not tuned in to the perception of a certain object, most likely we will not notice it. About 30 years later, Chicago psychologist Daniel Simons replicated the experiment, but now instead of a girl, a man dressed as a gorilla walked between the players. And even this potentially dangerous creature was not noticed by the audience. Simons made many modifications to this experiment to see how the viewer would react to changing conditions. For example, the viewer may know about the gorilla in advance, but if in the process of observing we change the color of the curtain against which the action takes place, he again will not notice anything. And this is another well-known error of attention — the so-called blindness to change: we do not notice even very large changes in the visual scene, if they occur very gradually or are accompanied, as it were, by a break in the film. For example, the game «find 10 differences» uses exactly this effect: we see the same scene as a whole, but with some changes, and we can not immediately notice them. If changes occur suddenly and in a static picture, they are picked up by motion detectors, which automatically draw our attention to the place where something happened.
Moreover, our brain does not detect changes, even if there is not a global interruption of the image, but its local noise. For example, a few splashes of dirt fall on the glass of a car. And we don’t notice them. Why? Are we not looking at what is changing, or are we not looking at where the change is taking place? Psychologists have tried to find an answer to this question — not very successfully. The answer was found by physiologists who used the method of functional MRI.
- Train your attention
There are special areas in our brain that process information about objects. For example, a human face, an image of a dwelling. Physiologists assumed that when a person does not notice a change in the face, there should be no activity in this zone. It turned out that the activity is really different when we notice and do not notice the change. But this also happens in other zones — in those that are associated with the unconscious processing of information about the location of the object. In other words, we are looking in the wrong direction and because of this we do not notice what is changing in the image on the periphery of our vision.
There is a special type of error that concerns what is already in the field of our perception — blindness to repetition. We do not notice the repetition of a visual object if it occurs within a certain interval of time or if this object is located next to the one we just saw. Therefore, in modern text editors, repeated words are underlined in red — to make the object different for us. If we see the same object, then our brain does not encode it separately, but relates it to the image that we just saw. For example, if we see a white dog on the lawn and, looking away for a moment, see the white dog again, we will think that it is the same white dog.
In fact, there are far more errors. In recent years, at the beginning of the XNUMXst century, psychologists and physiologists are finding them more and more. Philosophers argue whether it is necessary to discuss these errors at all, or whether in fact it is insignificant and we perceive everything that we need. I just want to note that when we think that we see and notice absolutely everything, it makes sense to stop, peer and think about whether this is so.