Daniel Simons
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2011–2025
1:22 · 34M views · Mar 10, 2010
The original invisible gorilla awareness test by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, in which viewers count basketball passes and often miss a gorilla crossing the scene. It demonstrates inattentional blindness.
HN uses it constantly as the classic demonstration that attention is selective, in threads on driving, motorcycles, AI and perception.
20 comments from Hacker News
As a motorcyclist -- and lifelong learner w/ a degree in cognitive psychology -- I really appreciate demonstrations like this one^1 from Daniel Simons. It's a short video (< 90s), but for many first-time viewers, it's an eye-opening experience. ^1. this video Edit: just saw @elosarv's link to a longer but more relevant "motorcycle invisibility training" video ( [LINK]
This is sound advice. The only time I've made contact with a moving car as a cyclist was when I was going past an off-ramp. The weird thing was that I thought the driver "saw me". It was late morning, no problem with visibility. From my POV, she was looking right at me. In fact, she was looking "through" me. She simply was expecting other cars and a person on a bike was not what she was looking for. Human attention is very much selective. Check out this shocking video: this video After that, I ride with a bright flashing headlight at all times, even daylight. It gives some measure of protection, I think.
It's called Selective Attention which explained in another comment: > Notably, people tend to see what they expect to see. > When they are looking for cars, they tend not to see motorcycles, even when they are in plain view. Watch/take this Selective Attention test (1 min 22 sec): this video
> The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. This seems like (from their point of view) the Blub paradox ( [LINK] ), and (from our point of view) something of its converse. From their point of view, they couldn't see the importance of sound recording because they didn't have any existing mechanisms to make use of it. From our point of view, we can't not see the importance of sound recording, because we have so many ways of making use of it. (Kind of like how, once you know the effect being demonstrated in this video , you not only no longer experience it, but find it hard to believe that you ever did.)
A friend who lives in North Carolina sent me a video of the raging floodwaters in his state- at least that's what the superimposed text claimed it was. When I looked closer, it was clearly an Indian city filled with Indian people and Indian cars. He hadn't noticed anything except the flood water. It reminded me of that famous selective attention test video[1]. I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it, but it's amazing what details we can miss when we aren't looking for them. I suspect this is made even worse when we're casually viewing videos in a disjointed way as on social media and we're not even giving one part of the video our full attention. 1. this video