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Can You Spot The Dancing Gorilla? Radiologists Couldn't
Saturday, February 16, 2013 22:47
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Dr Trafton Drew, a psychologist at Harvard medical had spent hours watching radiologists flicking through CT chest images and marvelled at their ability to detect tiny indicators of lung cancer.
“When I first saw radiologists searching through these images, they go through so fast and they detect these things that to me looked completely invisible and I just wondered how in the world are they doing this?”
This though led to the dancing gorilla, it is a classic experiment from the 1990s, in which observers of a basketball practice failed to see a man in a gorilla suit walk across the screen. This experiment and Dr Drew experiment. Dr Drew believed that radiologists, “the best searchers in the world”, were good at detecting cancers but wondered what else they might be missing.
When we focus our attention on a narrow task we tend to miss other things and this effect, termed inattentional blindness, is exactly what the basketball observers were demonstrating. It turns out that there’s a big difference between looking at something and perceiving it.
Dr Drew got some chest scans together and unknown to anyone superimposed a matchbox-sized image of a dancing gorilla into some of the scans. 80% of the radiologists asked to inspect the scans missed the dancing gorilla, even though some of them had been actually looking at it. 100% of unskilled observers, said they had seen nothing.
“Part of the reason that radiologists are so good at what they do is that they are very good at narrowly focusing their attention on these lung nodules. And the cost of that is that they’re subject to missing other things, even really obvious large things like a gorilla.”
Prof Daniel Simons, author of the original invisible gorilla study, explained that this effect is not unique to radiologists and reflects the way our attention system works.
“We’re aware of only a small subset of our visual world at any time. We focus attention on those aspects of the world that we want to see.
“By focusing attention, we can filter out distractions. But in limiting our attention to just those aspects of our world we are trying to see, we tend not to notice unexpected objects or events.”
Don’t panic though, we think this might sound dangerous, however on the radiologists defence they were only asked to look for cancer nodules. Dr Drew thinks that if they were asked to say more generally if there was anything wrong with the scans they would of been much more likely to find the gorilla.
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