The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us. Christopher Chabris

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СКАЧАТЬ actor was replaced by a different person! Wouldn’t you notice the only actor in a scene being replaced by a different person wearing different clothes, parting his hair the opposite way, and wearing different glasses?

      If you answered yes, you’re still under the illusion of memory. Here is what two subjects wrote after seeing the film:

      Subject 1: A young man with slightly long blond hair and large glasses turned around from the chair at a desk, got up, walked past the camera to a phone in the hallway, spoke into the phone and listened and looked at the camera.

      Subject 2: There was a blond guy with glasses sitting at a desk…not too cluttered but not exactly neat. He looked at the camera, rose, and walked out to the front right of the screen, his blue shirt billowing out a bit on his right over his white with light pattern tee-shirt…went into hallway, picked up phone, said something that didn’t seem to be “hello,” and then stood there looking kind of foolish for a bit.¹⁸

      Not a single subject who viewed this video spontaneously reported anything different before and after the change. Even when prompted more specifically with the question, “Did you notice anything unusual about the video?” no subjects reported the change in the actor’s identity or even his clothes from the first shot to the second. In a separate experiment, subjects watched the same video, but with the person-change pointed out to them. They were then asked whether they would have noticed the change had they viewed the video without the warning; 70 percent said they would have, compared with 0 percent who actually did. In this case, when people know about the change in advance, it becomes obvious and they all see it.¹⁹ But when they don’t expect the change, they completely miss it.

      Professional Change Detectors

      In most cases, we have almost no feedback about the limits on our ability to spot changes. We are aware only of the changes we do detect, and, by definition, changes we don’t notice cannot modify our beliefs about our change-detection acumen. One group, though, has extensive experience looking for changes to scenes: script supervisors, the professionals responsible for detecting continuity errors when making movies.²⁰ Are they immune to change blindness? If not, do they at least have above-average awareness of the limits on their ability to retain and compare visual information from one moment to the next?

      Trudy Ramirez has been a Hollywood script supervisor for nearly thirty years. She got her start working on commercials and quickly moved up to feature films. She has been the script supervisor on dozens of major movies and television programs, including Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Terminator 2, and Spider-Man 3. Dan spoke with Trudy Ramirez while she was working on the set of Iron Man 2.²¹ “I have a very good visual memory, but I also take copious notes,” she said. “I know that writing something down that I want to remember will often cement it into my memory.” The key, according to Ramirez, is that script supervisors realize they don’t need to remember everything. They focus on those details and aspects of a scene that matter, and ignore the rest.

      “Most of the time, I will remember what is important to the scene,” she continued. “We know what to look for. We know how to look.” Everyone on a film set has their own area of focus when watching a scene, but script supervisors are trained to look for those aspects of the scene that are central to facilitating the editing of the film. Ramirez noted, “There are points in the action of a scene where you know the editor will most likely cut: when someone sits or stands up, when someone turns around, or when someone comes into or goes out of a room…You start to develop a sense of how things will cut together, and therefore what is important to notice.” Script supervisors also learn what is important from experience, often painfully: “Over time, we all make tragic continuity errors which train us what to look for—whatever you didn’t notice that you later wished you had trains you to notice that thing or action next time.”²²

      So script supervisors are not immune to change blindness. The difference between them and everyone else is that script supervisors get direct feedback that they can and do miss changes. Through their experience of searching for errors and learning about their mistakes, they become less prone to the illusion that they can notice and retain everything around them. Ramirez said, “The one thing this has taught me is that my memory is very fallible. It’s shockingly fallible. You wouldn’t necessarily have any reason to think about how your memory was working unless you were doing something such as script supervising where it’s such an important part of it.” Critically, though, she knows that other people have similar limits. “When I am watching a movie, the more into the story I am, the less I notice things that are out of continuity. If I’m being swept along by the story and I’m involved with the characters, I am much less apt to notice something out of visual continuity. If you’re really into the story, huge continuity errors will go right by you—you’re not looking for those kinds of details…You can get away with a lot.”

      What does that say about people who make a habit of searching for continuity errors? If people spot continuity errors when watching a film, then the movie may have a bigger problem: It doesn’t engage viewers’ attention enough to keep them from searching for minor changes! Of course, some people will watch a movie multiple times just to look for errors. And if they do that, they are likely to find some. The impossibility of noticing everything is what guarantees the business prospects for books and websites on film flubs.

      Do You Have Any Idea Who You’re Talking To?

      Professor Ulric Neisser, whose research inspired our gorilla experiment, watched the change blindness demonstration in which an actor changed into another person while answering a phone, and he pointed out a possible limitation of all of these studies: They all used videos. He commented that watching video is an inherently passive activity: The action unfolds in front of us, but we do not actively engage with it the way we do when we interact socially with other people. Neisser argued that change blindness might not occur if a person were changed in the middle of a real-world encounter rather than across a cut in a passively viewed motion picture. The two Dans thought Neisser probably was right, that people would notice such a change in the real world, but they decided to run an experiment to test Neisser’s prediction anyway.

      Imagine you are strolling across a college campus and up ahead of you, you see a man holding a map and looking lost. The man approaches you and asks directions to the library. You start giving him directions, and as you’re pointing to the map, a couple of people behind you abruptly say “Excuse me, coming through,” and they rudely carry a big wooden door right between you and the lost pedestrian. Once they pass, you finish giving directions. Would you notice if the original lost pedestrian were replaced by a different person as the workers carried the door through? What if the two people wore different clothes, differed in height by about three inches, had different builds, and had noticeably different voices? You would have to be pretty oblivious to miss the change. After all, you were in the middle of a conversation with the man, and you had plenty of time to look at him. That’s certainly what the two Dans and Ulric Neisser thought.

      That’s also what more than 95 percent of undergraduates thought when asked whether they would notice.²³ And they were all wrong. All of us, undergraduates as well as scientists familiar with all of the research leading up to these experiments, fell prey to the illusion of memory. All were convinced that only the rare, unusually oblivious person could possibly miss the change. Yet nearly 50 percent of the people in the original experiment did not notice that they were talking to different people before and after the interruption!²⁴

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