Imagine That!

Annals of Ordinary and Extraordinary Genius

Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein are co-authors of Sparks of Genius, The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). See full bio

July 13, 2009, Creativity

Comments on "Do You See What I DON'T See?"

Do You See What I DON'T See?

By Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein on July 13, 2009 in Imagine That!

We made the point in two previous posts that observing is the key to imaging. Perhaps perversely, here we also want to argue the reverse. Imaging is a key ingredient in observing. Try on some inattentional blindness and perceptual illusions to see for yourself.

it was a still

Submitted by Dan Simons on July 14, 2009 - 5:02am.

Just a quick correction -- the image in the paper was a still from the video used in the research. The video itself was a composite of several videos filmed so that the players were partially transparent (the method section of our paper describes the approach we used to create the "transparent" videos). That approach was designed to duplicate the sort of displays used in earlier work by Ulric Neisser and his colleagues. The image in the paper was a still image taken from that composite video. It wasn't a test of any sort -- it was an accurate description of the videos and method described in the paper. You can see all of the videos used in our studies of inattentional blindness on my laboratory website at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html.