The invisible gorilla

[Martin Cassini]

An experiment by two US psychology professors, Daniel Simons and Chistopher Chabris, involves a counting task and an event which many participants don't notice because they are concentrating on the task. "We're good at focusing attention on a limited aspect of the world," says Simons. "We filter out things we don't care about, and sometimes filter out things we do." Reading the article (in today's Observer), I was thinking how this applies to traffic controls which demand our attention at the expense of more important things, such as (worst case) a stray pedestrian. Traffic engineers blame 'accidents' on 'driver error', never on their own interventions. "If you're not focusing attention on something, often you don't consciously perceive it," says Simons. "There is a failure of awareness. We need to be able to focus on what matters and not be distracted. At pedestrian speeds in the past, it didn't matter if you didn't notice stuff, but if you're doing 60mph and someone walks into the road, it matters if you don't notice, even for a fraction of a second. So it makes sense to build a system that uses focused attention". - So, crystal clear psychological support for FiT philosophy. More about the gorilla here.