Test Your Attention Capacity With Skoda’s New Commercial
Mar 8, 2015
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If you’ve seen the invisible gorilla experiment you already know how oblivious to details we can be, even when something is right in front of us.
A brilliant new video commercial by the Czech car manufacturer uses the same principals of selective attention and seems to work even on people who know what they’re watching.
Photographers deal with including (or excluding) details on a daily basis. This leads many to believe they have an exceptional ability to notice details that others don’t.
It’s time to test just how attentive you really are.
“Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is a psychological lack of attention and is not associated with any vision defects or deficits. It may be further defined as the event in which an individual fails to recognize an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight”.
That’s Wikipedia’s definition for what’s about to happen to you. Yes, even though you’ve been informed in advance.
Watch the video carefully and see how many of the details you can spot:
Pretty cool, huh?
Skoda’s video follows the same concept as one of psychology’s most famous experiments – the invisible gorilla.
For those who have not seen the invisible gorilla experiment, here it is:
The experiment, which became a worldwide hit so I have no idea how you managed to not see it until now, was conducted in 1999 at Harvard University. While it was not the first of its kind, its immense popularity led to it becoming the poster child of inattentional blindness.
So, how did you do? Are you the grandmaster of detail who doesn’t let a fly in the frame go unnoticed or are you the type who doesn’t notice the bride is crying as long as her face is in focus? Let us know in the comments how many of the details you noticed and which you missed.
Liron Samuels
Liron Samuels is a wildlife and commercial photographer based in Israel. When he isn’t waking up at 4am to take photos of nature, he stays awake until 4am taking photos of the night skies or time lapses. You can see more of his work on his website or follow him on Facebook.
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4 responses to “Test Your Attention Capacity With Skoda’s New Commercial”
The reason the trick works in the video is due to the black frame that flashes between changes. If there were no black frame, you would see the changed item wink in or out. But by slipping in a black flash, it’s not at noticeable.
I dont think it works because from the start you know it’s an attention test and you’re searching for stuff. It didn’t do the trick for me. If I hadn’t been searching for changing patterns, maybe. The reason why the gorilla test works is because you’re asked to count the passes, and a gorilla just happens to walk by as the thing you’re trying to count moves around. In the car clip, the car is still. I can focus on the rest of the video.
I had no problems seeing the gorilla. My counting was right, too. Don’t know how you could not see it. :-D But I understand your intend with this post. Sometimes we’re focusing on one thing too much (pun intended) and do not see when something special is happening or not working for our photograph. As long as the face is in focus :-)
What does it say about my attention capacity if I say I did not watch the video and skipped straight to making a sarcastic comment? :)