The invisible gorilla strikes again: sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers

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updated Mar 30, 2022

One page on PainSci cites Drew 2013: The Double-Edged Sword of Imaging to Diagnose Pain

PainSci notes on Drew 2013:

“What is it, Doc? What’s wrong with me? Why the sudden banana obsession? The knuckle-walking?”

“Well, the bad news is that you’ve got a little gorilla in your lungs. But we caught it early—only 17% of radiologists can spot it at this stage. Lucky break!“

original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.

Researchers have shown that people often miss the occurrence of an unexpected yet salient event if they are engaged in a different task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. However, demonstrations of inattentional blindness have typically involved naive observers engaged in an unfamiliar task. What about expert searchers who have spent years honing their ability to detect small abnormalities in specific types of images? We asked 24 radiologists to perform a familiar lung-nodule detection task. A gorilla, 48 times the size of the average nodule, was inserted in the last case that was presented. Eighty-three percent of the radiologists did not see the gorilla. Eye tracking revealed that the majority of those who missed the gorilla looked directly at its location. Thus, even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to inattentional blindness.

original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.

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