If Barack Obama’s head suddenly appeared on your screen, you would see it — right? Don’t be show sure. Recent psychology research, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, demonstrates that under the right conditions, we sometimes can’t even “see” something right in front of us.
“When an observer’s expectations are violated, even a single object will not be perceived, despite robust sensory evidence,” wrote Marjan Persuh and Robert Melara of the City University of New York in their study, titled “Barack Obama Blindness.”
The concept of “inattentional blindness” emerged thanks to a 1999 study that came to be known as the invisible gorilla experiment. In the study, participants were asked to watch a video showing a group of people passing a basketball. They were instructed to count how often the ball was passed.
While the participants were focused on counting how many times the basketball moved from person to person, a man in a gorilla suit walked into the scene and beat his chest before walking off. Surprisingly, only a small percent of the participants reported seeing the gorilla. Inattentional blindness “is a failure to consciously perceive otherwise fully visible objects once another activity engages attention,” Persuh and Melara explained.
In their new study, the researchers investigated whether inattentional blindness could occur even when there was no other visible object present. To this end, Persuh and Melara sat 20 undergraduate students down in front of a computer and had them focus on a dot on the screen. The screen first displayed the dot, then displayed two faces, then displayed a number of black lines and then displayed a blank screen. Then, the screen displayed the dot again — but followed this time by a novel shape — then the black lines again, and finally the blank screen.
Only two of the students were able to correctly identify the novel object that had been presented on the screen.
In a follow-up experiment, Persuh and Melara had another 20 students complete a similar task. Except this time, the novel shape on the screen was replaced with a picture of President Barack Obama’s face. Only 4 of the students reported seeing Obama’s face on the screen.
“Participants in both experiments established expectations about stimuli in the upcoming trial and so failed to consciously perceive a novel, salient stimulus when these expectations were violated. Experiment 2 provided especially dramatic evidence of blindness because here a highly meaningful and familiar stimulus, the face of President Barack Obama, appeared alone on the screen,” Persuh and Melara said.