← all facts
attention
You miss the obvious when your focus is occupied.
Participants often fail to notice a prominent stimulus, like a person in a costume, when they are engaged in a simple counting task.
Inattentional blindness reveals that perception is not a passive process of 'seeing' what is in front of you. The brain prioritizes specific tasks so aggressively that it essentially filters out anything outside that narrow goal.
You see exactly what you are looking for.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Simons and Chabris, 1999
- What the check found
- The reference confirms the authors and the experiment, though it does not detail the specific methodology of the counting task or the costume stimulus.
- 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.