Using artist Eric Pickersgill’s photos of people being absorbed into their hands holding smartphones, Professor Christopher Chabris illustrates the intriguing ways in which ordinary objects capture our mind, opening the first Psychology Speaker Series talk of the academic year last Thursday.

He raises the question of what captures our attention and how in a talk titled “The Invisible Gorilla: From the Classroom to the Real World, and Back Again.”

Professor Chabris introduces to the packed room of over 30 people the phenomenon called “inattentional blindness,” plus its research and implications.

Attention has been one of Professor Chabris’ research focuses for many years. Some of the works mentioned in the talk were conducted at Union with Union students as experimenters and subjects, as Professor Chabris previously taught at Union as an Associate Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Neuroscience Program for nearly a decade.

Beforehand, he received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, where he was also a Lecturer and Research Associate. Chabris is now at Geisinger, an integrated healthcare system in Pennsylvania, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France.

He has co-authored the New York Times bestseller book “The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us.” This book is based on a 1999 experiment informally called the “invisible gorilla” experiment, conducted by

Chabris and his co-author Daniel Simons. This was also the center of his talk.

According to Professor Chabris, this research was based on cross trials conducted by Ulric Neisser, a famous psychologist who wrote the first book in cognitive science. In these trials, people failed to notice objects they were not asked to see: subjects, watching a video of two groups of shadows of people and counting the number of times either group passes a ball, failed to notice there was a woman holding an umbrella in the video.

“This was not the norm of cognitive research in the 80s and 90s. We had people sit in front of a screen and watch animated objects as they press buttons,” Chabris says.

Inspired by Neisser, Harvard instructor Dan Simons invited research fellow Chabris to replicate the trials with a video of Harvard students passing balls as a man dressed in a gorilla costume or a woman holding an umbrella passes by. Subjects were asked to either count the number of ball passes of either of the team wearing the white shirt or the team wearing black shirt.

Results found that nearly half of the subjects failed to notice the gorilla or the woman, even though these clearly visible objects stay in the video for a significant amount of time, as Chabris shows the video to the talk attendees. This experiment later became a textbook standard demonstration of inattentional blindness.

Chabris goes into detail on how inattentional blindness can interfere with radiology tests results: radiologists, given a goal to search in the scans, might just focus on the goal instead of noticing other abnormalities.

He also gives inattentional blindness as one possible cause of the 1995 beating of officer Michael Cox in Boston: Kenneth Conley could be subjected to inattentional blindness if he was so focused on chasing the target that he failed to notice officers beating up Cox on his way.

Chabris actually set up a reenactment of this incident with Union students. BBC was on campus to film the study. Results show that inattentional blindness could have been the problem in the original incident.

Chabris also illustrates several safety ramifications of inattentional blindness, including texting while driving or police officer failing to notice guns as they pull cars over.

To test if inattentional blindness was a universal phenomenon for people all over the world, Professor Chabris collaborated with Union’s Minerva Fellows to run the gorilla experiment in 12 locations all over the world. Results show that inattentional blindness is probably universal.

Professor Chabris ended the talk by answering questions from the audience. Questions involved possible further studies of inattentional blindness, its evolutionary basis or possible language and technology barrier problems in the Minerva programs’ experiments.