Sep 28, 2006
Attention and working memory
By: Alvaro Fernandez
Do we have selective attention? Do we all have “attention deficits”? or are they “working memory” challenges?
Let’s try this little experiment, conceived by Simons and Chabris for their classic study on sustained inattentional blindness (1999).You will watch a brief video clip, and your challenge is to count the total number of times that the basketballs change hands.
Click here to view the Basketball Experiment clip (To view it, you will need to have Java active in your browser. The video is fairly large, 7.5MB, and it might take a while to finish loading.)
You can read about the fascinating results here.
Credit for pic: Haines World
29 – 30 times
I only saw the gorilla after I went back to watch it without counting the passes. The first time I watched it twice and counted 24 then 29 times and never saw the gorilla. So I guess with watching the ball I did not see the gorilla and with watching for the gorilla I couldn’t count the number of passes. One thing at a time, I guess.
Man I feel like such a tard for cheating and looking at the answer first, but I counted 34.
my teacher loves this site, i like the gurilla, how many times did tyhey actually pass the ball i got like 30 times.?
i counted 31 passes but at the end of the video 1 pass is about to happen but the video stops so its 31
got distracted by the gorilla couldnt keep count of the basketballs
Hi,
I counted 27 for the first time and didn’t noticed the gorilla however after reading the comments i saw that video again and noticed the gorilla and noticed 29 passes.
Just wanted to know Personal who observed gorrila first time are less stressed? Wats ur view on this.?
I totally lost count when the gorilla came in. Then I just watched the gorilla and stopped counting. lol
I counted 29 passes and briefly noticed the gorilla… but I wanted to count the passes so I didn’t watch him much. I’m not even sure if he got the ball :p
I counted 32 hand-offs and 1 raged gorilla.
I counted the hand-offs by focusing on both basketballs at the same time and remembering who had the ball the last time I checked…
I cannot assume that I counted correctly. Does anyone know the ‘actual’ number of hand-offs ?
Hedin.
I counted 27, plus 1 gorilla.
The first time I watched I counted 30 passes,saw the gorilla & the S’s, but didn’t notice the white/white and black/black passing combinations. I’m thinking that it’s because I’ve been an elementary teacher for 20 years. For example, I’ve had to train myself to watch all of my children on the playground at the same time, though they may be doing different activities. I have to conduct a small reading group, while monitoring the computer station, the independent workers, etc. to make sure that everyone is on task while interacting with the reading group as well as taking mental notes to write down informal assessment grades for each child in the reading group between that group and the next.
I watched it a second time, focusing on the white shirts passing to white shirts and got 15. The third time I focused on black shirts passing to black shirts and counted 20, though I wasn’t quite sure because it looked as though the ball had been passed off out of view a couple of times. The second and third time I did notice the gorilla, but I didn’t notice the S’s, even though I had noticed them the first time I watched.
i counted 28 but the gorilla got in the way then i lost count.. so how many passes are there??
I only counted 29 and I saw the monkey the first the only reason I watched it twice more is because some ppl were saying 30 + times I counted 29 three times
My bad 33 passes and the monkey and blacks pass 2 black and white pass to white…….and they pass in a sequence they only pass to the same person each time
I see 14 times ball changed hands between white dress group and 18 times among black dress group…
31
I didn’t see the gorilla you guys are talking about. Or the flying pig…
32 I didn’t see any gorilla.
I seen two teams of three, two balls and one gorilla. Between the two teams I counted 33 passes.
the visual noise was very distracting, its futile to count the passes… no I did not see the gorilla the first time…
well, i counted 29 then 24 and saw the gorilla both times.
Saw a black thing in the video but was busy in counting passes..thay come out to be 28
i counted 29
29
This is pretty interesting. I did see the gorilla, and counted only 27 passes. There were a few ‘fake” passes. Does anybody know the correct #? The study on the stranger asking directions, and changing as the door passed is very interesting. Great website. Glad to find it!
haha seriously didn’t see the gorilla until i read someone had seem him. i was only focused on the balls. counted 29-30 i think.
haha i counted 29 times, i saw the gorilla but did not process the idea that he walked in
i counted 31 passes , there may have been more but the dam gorilla got in the way.
Saw this in class last week. It totally got me.
23
I counted 34, 1 gorilla, and noticed that the white shirt team and black shirt team don’t pass each other the basketball but rather they keep one ball between the white shirts and one between the black shirts.
I watched it twice, but I counted 34 passes.
I counted 30 times, and noticed someone go through the group, but DID NOT notice it was a gorilla. After reading the posts and going back to watch it, I was amazed at how it stopped to pound it’s chest and slowly and deliberately it was moving. I didn’t notice but a moving shape!