Haveyoueverbeensoabsorbedinaconversationatapartythatyou...

问题详情：

Have you ever been so absorbed in a conversation at a party that you failed to notice that someone new is standing only six inches away from you, trying to get your attention? It’s possible that you were so distracted that you didn’t notice someone approaching you. But it’s also entirely likely that you were experiencing change blindness.

       Change blindness is a phenomenon that occurs when a person is unable to notice visual changes in their environment, despite the fact that they are often rather obvious. In cases of change blindness, the person isn’t failing to notice small or insignificant changes, but will probably miss big changes, like someone standing next to them waving their hand.

       Early experiments with change blindness focused largely on memory and perception when viewing pictures. For example, a person might be shown a photograph of a street scene in Egypt and told to memorize the image. Following that, they would be shown the same picture with certain elements added or taken away and asked to identify what’s different. Very often the individual could recall the larger aspects of the picture but couldn’t recognize the smaller changes.

       In the 1990s, researcher Daniel Simons conducted a fascinating study into change blindness that many people find unbelievable. In Simons’ study, he asked participants to watch a video of a basketball being passed around between several people, with a particular focus on the basketball itself. When the experiment was over, Simons found that a large number of participants were so focused on watching the basketball being passed around that they failed to notice a man in a gorilla suit jumping around in front of the camera.

       It’s important to note that the change in Simons’ video wasn’t subtle; the gorilla is very obviously taking up much of the frame. Simons concluded that participants were experiencing inattentional blindness, which is when a person fails to notice a major change because they are so focused on another task. In this case, because participants were asked to focus on the movement of the basketball, their brains prioritized that task in order to do it properly, thereby missing the other things happening in the video.

       In the case of Simons’ study, participants engaged what’s referred to as attentional selection, which is when a person selects certain things to focus on in order to achieve a task and filters out anything that is unrelated to the objective.

       There are a number of theories about what causes a person’s inability to recognize obvious changes in their environment, but most agree that the phenomenon is related to sensory processing. Broadly speaking, our brains have a limited capacity to detect and process everything in our environment. Instead, what the brain does is choose certain things to process, evaluate, and store, which allows other things to be missed or filtered out.

       In simple terms, change blindness has a great deal to do with where a person directs their attention. In the case of the gorilla and the basketball, people focused their attention almost exclusively on one thing, which caused them to miss other elements or changes. Given that attention is often at the root of change blindness, a person’s age or mental and physical health can influence how well they will notice changes in stimuli.

【回答】

71. Definition/Concept   72. unnoticed         73. focus    74. poor  75. moving

76. escaped    77. priority     78. Causes      79. choices     80. related/linked

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