← all facts
attention
You do not see what you are not expecting.
Highly focused attention can lead to inattentional blindness, where the rate of missing unexpected events ranges from 8% to 83% depending on the difficulty of the primary task.
The 'nearly half' figure simplifies a wide range of results recorded in the Simons & Chabris (1999) study.
You are only seeing what you are currently looking for.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Simons & Chabris (1999)
- What the check found
- While the core phenomenon is real, the specific number of 'nearly half' obscures that the rate was highly dependent on experimental conditions.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.