Are We Truly “Inattentionally Blind”?

hubie writes:

If you aren't familiar with the experiment where you try to count the number of times a basketball is passed between people, you should watch the video and try the experiment first before reading on.

Research Reveals We Can Spot the Unexpected Better than Commonly Believed:

We are quite good at spotting unexpected objects while focused on another activity if they are moving fast, reveals a new study by a team of New York University researchers. Their findings cast doubt on a long-standing view that our ability to see the unexpected is necessarily impaired when our attention is already directed elsewhere.

"For decades, it's been thought that when we're intently focused on something relevant, like driving or playing a game, we fail to spot something that unexpectedly enters our field of vision, even if it is clearly visible and moving," says Pascal Wallisch, a clinical associate professor at New York University's Center for Data Science and Department of Psychology and lead author of the paper, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our study questions the generality of this view because it shows that people, while focusing on a task, are quite capable of noticing unexpected objects that are moving quickly. However, our research confirms that we are indeed less adept at noticing these same objects when they are moving slowly."

The research team, who also included Wayne Mackey, Michael Karlovich, and David Heeger, centered its study on "inattentional blindness"-the inability to notice unexpected objects if attention is focused on a task. [...]

This and similar studies characterized one of the most striking phenomena in cognitive psychology-inattentional blindness-as an inevitable flip side of task focusing, and essentially a deficit.

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