The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again: Article Analysis

Drew, Võ, and Wolfe wrote, “The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again: Sustained Inattentional Blindness in Expert Observers.” They wrote: researchers have shown that people often miss the occurrence of an unexpected yet salient event if they are engaged in a different task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. But, demonstrations of inattentional blindness have typically involved naive observers engaged in an unfamiliar task. What about expert searchers who have spent years honing their ability to detect small abnormalities in specific types of images? They asked 24 radiologists to perform a familiar lung-nodule detection task. A gorilla, 48 times the size of the average nodule, was inserted in the last case that was presented. Eighty-three percent of the radiologists did not see the gorilla. Eye tracking revealed that the majority of those who missed the gorilla looked directly at its location. Thus, even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to
The experiments in this paper show that people can also establish attentional sets based on semantic categories, and that these high-level attentional sets modulate sustained inattentional blindness. In ‘‘Experiment 1’’, participants tracked four moving numbers and ignored four moving letters or vice versa, and the unexpected object was either a capital letter ‘E’ or its reverse, a block-like number ‘3’. Despite their featural similarity, participants were more likely to notice the unexpected object belonging to the same category as the tracked