[Video] How Narrow Is Your Attentional Field?

Human attention resources are extremely limited: at any given moment, they can point only at an incredibly narrow target.

How narrow are we talking? Narrow enough to make you practically blind with your eyes open.

One of the most famous examples is the invisible gorilla experiment: participants asked to carefully count how many times a group of people tossed a ball somehow failed to see a gorilla walk right through the scene.

The two-minute video below lets you experience for yourself just how narrow your attentional field is.

This video is called Test Your Awareness: Whodunnit. It was filmed by London Transport as a micro-detective film, to remind drivers to stay focused while driving.

In the video, a detective questions 3 suspects and eventually arrests one of them. The first half shows the investigation and arrest. After watching it, you may feel that there was nothing suspicious at all, until the second half replays the film from an all-seeing perspective. Only then may you notice that you somehow missed so many blatantly unreasonable details in the scene.

How narrow is your attentional field? Use this video to find out.

responsive Bilibili video player

.video-container {
position: relative;
width: 100%;
padding-bottom: 56.25%; /* 16:9 aspect ratio */
height: 0;
overflow: hidden;
}
.video-container iframe {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
border: 0;
}

Notes

• The articles in this New Findings in Psychology series were short popular-psychology pieces and casual essays written at the time to accompany the material related to Zhichao Wei: A Course on New Psychological Knowledge. They were published on the now-closed platform Fanduan, and the original link no longer exists.