By modifying a famous experiment involving a person in a gorilla suit and two teams of people passing basketballs back and forth, Simons demonstrated that expecting the unexpected does not improve one’s chances of seeing it.
CHAMPAIGN, lll. A new study finds that those who know that an unexpected event is likely to occur are no better at noticing other unexpected events - and may be even worse - than those who aren?t expecting the unexpected. The study, from Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology and an affiliate of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, appears this month as the inaugural paper in the new open access journal i-Perception. The study used a new video based on one used in a now-famous experiment conducted in the late 1990s by Simons and his collaborator, Christopher Chabris, now a psychology professor at Union College in New York. In the original video, two groups of people - some dressed in white, some in black - are passing basketballs back and forth. The study subjects were asked to count the passes among those dressed in white while ignoring the passes of those in black. (To test your own skill at this task, stop reading and visit here.
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