This is an experiment on auditory awareness. In order to participate in this experiment you need to listen to an audio file (step #1). After that you have to answer two questions about what you heard (step #2). You will then be given further information about the purpose of the experiment (debrief/step #3). It is important that you follow the experimental sequence below in order.
Step #1. Start the auditory experiment
Please listen to the following binaural recording – afterwards you will be asked several questions about what you heard – so listen carefully…
When you finished listening you can continue with step #2 below.
Step #2. Your responses
Step #3. Debrief
Listen to the debriefing – it will explain the background of this perceptual experiment.
This is the original article which was published by Dalto & Fraenkel (2012) in the journal ‘Cognition’.
Emprical results show that on average 50% of participants completely miss the “auditory gorilla”. Did you hear it? If not, listen again and you will be surprised how you could miss it in the first trial. This experiment tells us a lot about the inherent limits and the task-specificity of attentional resources. The phenomenon is called “inattentional blindness”. Our attention has been metaphorically compared to a spotlight which only illuminates a small proportion of the vastness of reality.
References
Dalton, P., & Fraenkel, N.. (2012). Gorillas we have missed: Sustained inattentional deafness for dynamic events. Cognition, 124(3), 367–372.
“With each eye fixation, we experience a richly detailed visual world. yet recent work on visual integration and change direction reveals that we are surprisingly unaware of the details of our environment from one view to the next: we often do not detect large changes to objects and scenes (‘change blindness’). furthermore, without attention, we may not even perceive objects (‘inattentional blindness’). taken together, these findings suggest that we perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive focused attention. in this paper, we briefly review and discuss evidence for these cognitive forms of ‘blindness’. we then present a new study that builds on classic studies of divided visual attention to examine inattentional blindness for complex objects and events in dynamic scenes. our results suggest that the likelihood of noticing an unexpected object depends on the similarity of that object to other objects in the display and on how difficult the priming monitoring task is. interestingly, spatial proximity of the critical unattended object to attended locations does not appear to affect detection, suggesting that observers attend to objects and events, not spatial positions. we discuss the implications of these results for visual representations and awareness of our visual environment.”