[throwway_278314]

Work which exaggerates the blindness.

The people were told to focus very deeply on a certain aspect of the scene. Maintaining that focus means explicitly blocking things not related to that focus. Also, there is social pressure at the end to have peformed well at the task; evaluating them on a task which is intentionally completely different than the one explicitly given is going to bias people away from reporting gorillas.

And also, "notice anything unusual" is a pretty vague prompt. No-one in the video thought the gorillas were unusual, so if the PEOPLE IN THE SCENE thought gorillas were normal, why would I think they were strange? Look at any TV show, they are all full of things which are pretty crazy unusual in normal life, yet not unusual in terms of the plot.

Why would you think the gorillas were unusual?

[dewarrn1]

I understand what you mean. I believe that the authors would contend that what you're describing is a typical attentional state for an awake/aware human: focused mostly on one thing, and with surprisingly little awareness of most other things (until/unless they are in turn attended).

Furthermore, even what we attend to isn't always represented with all that much detail. Simons has a whole series of cool demonstration experiments where they show that they can swap out someone you're speaking with (an unfamiliar conversational partner like a store clerk or someone asking for directions), and you may not even notice [0]. It's rather eerie.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ&t=5s

[InDubioProRubio]

Does that work on autistic people? Having no filters or fewer filters, should allow them to be more efficient "on guard duty" looking for unexpected things.