Mind: You Can't Focus on Everything at Once

Contributed by Martha ...

This new research builds on the well-known "Gorillas in Our Midst" experiment, a staple of Psych 101 courses. Researchers say they can now explain why many people fail to see a "gorilla" who unexpectedly appears in a video when their attention is focused on another task -- it's because they have lower "working memory capacity," a measure of the ability to keep your brain tuned into many things at once.

In the study, 197 psychology students (ages 18 to 35) watched a 24-second video of six people playing basketball. They were asked to count the number of bounce passes and aerial passes made by the black-shirted team. Twelve seconds into the video, an actor dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the hoops game, pounds his chest, then leaves. The "gorilla" appears on screen for eight seconds.

After viewing the segment, researchers asked participants for the two different pass counts and whether they noticed anything unusual in the clip. Slightly more than half the participants, or 58%, noticed the ape but 42% did not.

While completing difficult tasks, people with higher working memory capacity can keep more information in their minds. And these folks are more likely to see the gorilla. That's because they "have more attentional resources allowing them to use any 'leftover' resources to monitor the environment and notice the gorilla," explains Seegmiller.

In fact, researchers found that among participants who were most accurate in counting basketball passes in the video -- the original task at hand -- 67% of those with "high working memory capacity" observed the gorilla but only 36% with "low working memory capacity" did.

For more, see You Can't Focus on Everything at Once. Here's Why by Cari Nierenberg, April 21, 2011 at The Body Odd.