What is a selective attention test?

The selective attention test is used to prove that people often do not know about certain visual stimuli when they focus on other aspects of what they see. This type of test is used to show how few people watch in the world around them and how unusual events can be missing when they focus on the task. There are many different types of tests that can be proposed, although the most famous was developed by Dr. Daniel Simons, professor of psychology.

in the selective attention test Simons watches a video of a video of six people around two basketballs. Three of the people are dressed in black and the other three are dressed in white. Tested entities are asked to calculate how many times people dressed in a white passage of the ball and ignore the behavior of people dressed in black. Visually the video contains a large amount of information because all six people move continuously and the test entity must monitor the movement of one of the basketball in the video.

Near this selective attention test, a person dressed in a gorilla suit is undergoing a scene and stops on Wednesday to beat the chest before performing on the video on the other side. Test entities are then asked how many times the basketball has been handed over between white players. Once the answers, they are asked if they noticed the gorillas. Almost half of the people who attended the study did not notice the presence of gorilla.

This selective attention test shows that people do not have to notice things that enter their field of vision when they are biased by other tasks such as counting. This is because the brain has a limited amount of working memory and devotes it to the task rather than observing the environment. This effect is called non -zero blindness.

Psychologists can take advantage of selective attention to learn more about how the brain processes attention and memory. Using a selective attention test "Invisible Gorilla" showed inappropriate blindness while gaveTests developed by Dr. Simons also showed that entities that were expected to see one thing like gorilla often do not notice other changes in the environment. These tests also show that people are often wrong about how much they notice and remember what they have seen.