Inattentional Blindness

The task in this lab was to go to the website (invisiblegorilla) and look at a video. This video was an example of inattentional blindness (and selective attention). In the video, we were asked to count how many times the basketball was thrown between a group of people wearing white T-shirts. While that was going on a gorilla walks into the frame, right in the middle of the screen. Many would think that the majority of people would notice the gorilla, and many would probably think that they themselves would notice that, however, many people fail to see the gorilla because of a term called inattentional blindness.
Inattentional blindness is what it sounds like, a “blindness” that is “inattentional.” In other words, this is basically not being aware of something, not purposely being unaware of what is going on, at least. For instance, a person talking while driving may be focusing on talking to the person on his or her phone, and not paying attention to driving, intentionally at least. The person may be unaware of what of them not paying attention until, unfortunately, they crash, or something is pointed out to them, that may indicated that they were indeed, not paying attention. …show more content…
The reason being is you can’t have one without the other. Selective attention is being able to focus on one or item (stimuli), blocking out everything else in the world. When you block everything else in the world, this is when inattentional blindness kicks in, where a simultaneous action will occur, and you will not see it because you are focusing on a specific task. You wouldn’t be able to have inattentional blindness without having selective attention. In the case of the invisible gorilla, the person told you to closely count how many times a group of people bounced a basketball to each other. This is gearing you to use your selective attention to focus on counting a passed