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  • Essay / Psychological Concept of Inattentional Blindness

    You're driving down a highway while talking on the phone, but you're still focusing really hard on the road ahead when, bam, you hit a deer! What happened? There's no way it was there a second ago! This question is very similar to the question I hope to answer in my experiment: "What is the psychological concept of inattentional blindness and what percentage of the population is susceptible to it?" I chose this topic because I find the topic of texting while driving very relevant to today's times and wanted to learn more about it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Inattentional blindness is defined as when a person is unable to see something that is in plain sight. This is not a lack of visual perception, but simply the inability to notice something unexpected that is right in front of you because your attention is focused elsewhere. Blindness due to inattention is currently a very current problem because it is the cause of many road accidents. Because drivers are focused on something like texting, they don't notice something happening right in front of them, like a driver stopping or a deer running across the road. With this project, I hope to raise awareness about the problem. about inattentional blindness and how it relates to other driving problems such as texting while driving. Another element of inattentional blindness is change blindness, which is the inability to notice a change in an image because it is a small change and you are not paying attention to the specific area that changes in the image. This is related to inattentional blindness because inattentional blindness and change blindness occur when you notice something that is right in front of you. The difference between inattentional blindness and change blindness is that inattentional blindness has to do with not noticing something because you are doing something else, while change blindness is simply not noticing a small change like a new haircut. Another crucial element of inattentional blindness is visual perception. . Visual perception is the ability to use your eyes to send information to your brain. This is important for inattentional blindness because inattentional blindness is an error your brain makes in your ability to understand certain things otherwise known as visual perception. My project procedures involve showing people a video of six people passing a basketball. Half the people wear white and the other half wear black. The students' goal is to count the number of times people dressed in white pass the ball. They don't know it, but in the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla suit will walk through the video. My experiment is to test what percentage of people do not notice the gorilla, therefore being likely to become blind from inattention. This type of experiment has been attempted several times, for example in which radiologists were required to perform a simple test to detect lung nodules. Halfway through the test, a gorilla would float on the screen and the researchers would see if the radiologists had noticed the gorilla. Only 27% of radiologists reported seeing the gorilla, showing that most people were so focused on finding the lung nodules that they didn't notice the gorilla. This proves that many people are affected by blindness..