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Mind

There's a new twist on the famous invisible gorilla psychology study

A classic study found that people can fail to notice a gorilla when they are focusing on something else, but new experiments suggest this "inattentional blindness" might not tell the whole story

By Michael Le Page

15 November 2024

A person in a gorilla suit can be easy to miss if you are focusing on something else

Skully/Alamy

When we are focusing on one task, we often fail to notice something obvious in our field of view. This phenomenon, known as inattentional blindness, was famously demonstrated in a study involving a person in a gorilla suit, which participants failed to spot. But now it seems the gorilla isn’t so invisible, and we do actually take in information even when we might miss the wider picture.

In a classic experiment from 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, then at…

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