Gorillas in the Lung

The Scientist:

Anyone who’s taken an introductory psychology course in the last 20 years likely remembers the “invisible gorilla” video. The video shows a group of kids engaged in a ball-passing game while, mostly unnoticed, a man in a gorilla suit scurries through the scene. The video is a striking example of a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, whereby observers may miss unexpected, but salient, events while engaged in other tasks.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston examined whether inattentional blindness also affects expert observers. Their findings, published Wednesday (July 17) in Psychological Science, show that 83 percent of radiologists did not spot an image of a gorilla inserted into the CT scan of a pair of lungs they were asked to evaluate. The results demonstrate that even highly trained observers fall victim to inattentional blindness.

Read the whole story: The Scientist