You may have seen a widely shared Internet video that was used in one of psychology’s most famous experiments. It’s a 60-second test that shows six people passing basketballs and asks you to count the passes made by the players wearing white. If you aren’t familiar with the test, try it here -- www.dansimons.com/videos.html -- then read on.
The video was produced by Dan Simons, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, for a study on attention. In numerous test groups, he found that most people counted the passes correctly, but about half didn’t recall seeing anything other than people and basketballs.
What they failed to notice was a man in a gorilla suit who strolled into the middle of the action, thumped his chest and walked off after spending nine seconds on screen.
The results demonstrate a phenomenon called inattentional blindness. Dan and his co-researcher, Christopher Chabris, explain that our intuitions can trick us into not noticing important events. Because we can’t fully process everything, we naturally focus our attention on what’s obvious and familiar. That can make the “unobvious” difficult to spot, even when it’s as conspicuous as an ape in a basketball game.
It’s a concept that bridge players can understand because we’ve all experienced some form of it at the table. We can be so focused on one aspect of the bidding or play that we don’t notice important details and unexpected developments. We miss partner’s count signal because we were concentrating on what to play from our own hand. When declaring, we’re so unhappy with our hopeless contract that we stop watching the opponents’ discards and go down an extra trick, turning an average-minus into a zero.
Many mistakes are caused by a failure to consider what could happen later in the auction or the play, but inattentional blindness can also strike when we think too far into the future.
Suppose partner opens 1S and you hold ♠AQ ♥AQ854 ♦KQ1064 ♣2 . Immediately, you’re mentally planning the rest of the auction: Respond 2H, follow with 3D, maybe show the spade honors, and eventually head for slam based on what you learn from partner’s rebids.
Before you can respond, however, your RHO makes a takeout double – an unexpected development when you and partner hold three-quarters of the strength. The double is the gorilla in the auction, and it’s easy to miss if you’re too fixated on your original plan for the auction. Even with the red Double card in full view, your mind may “see” the presumed Pass and your 2H bid is on the table before you realize what happened. Over the opponent's double, your 2H is a weak bid, so you may be playing a partscore in a 5-1 fit instead of a laydown slam.
The simplest explanation for inattentional blindness is that we miss important details because we aren’t looking for them. When playing bridge, you can’t predict every bid or play that might come up, but you can improve your powers of observation. If you’re aware of how easily your mind can see what isn’t there – and vice versa – you’ll be more motivated to pay careful attention to every bid and every card.
Research on inattentional blindness offers
answers to many questions about societal issues, including false memories,
distracted driving and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Dan and Chris
discuss these in their popular book, The Invisible Gorilla: How our
Intuitions Deceive Us.
© 2016 Karen Walker