Bored? Wondering what you could
do to let time pass? Watching movies is an easy and fun way of killing time
(lucky you if you got loads of it!). But instead of doing the usual movie
marathon, why not make it more exciting? Test your visual skills and try
searching for things that you missed before. You may not know it, but there are
a lot of movie scenes you’ve probably seen
but failed to notice because you weren’t
paying enough attention. To get to my point, let me ask you a few questions:
Did you notice Mike Wazowski from
Monsters Inc. in the credits scene of Finding Nemo? Did you know that the King from Cinderella attended Ursula’s wedding in
the Little Mermaid? Or did you recognize Rapunzel and Flynn Rider’s cameo in
the recent Disney film, Frozen?
If you answered ‘no’ to these
questions, then why not try looking for them? It’s just like finding the Hidden
Mickey in a sea of other stimuli. I, myself, did not notice Rapunzel and Flynn
when I first watched the movie. Even more interesting is the fact that I still
failed to notice them despite my awareness of their appearance. It’s
fascinating how seeing something in full view does not always translate into
perception and recognition. This phenomenon has been coined inattentional blindness and it is often
linked to the study of attention. According to Simons (2000), salient and
distinctive objects may not be detected by a person who is focused on something
else. Thinking about it, maybe I was just staring at the screen during the
credits scene and not paying attention to the background image. Maybe I was too
preoccupied in following the character of Anna as she was roaming around the
castle and singing to the tune of For the
First Time in Forever which is why I didn’t even bother looking at the
crowd.
According to Mack (2003), it
requires attention for people to really see
what they are looking at. When
people are preoccupied with another task, some fail to see what is really out
there. He also mentioned the existing debate on whether inattentional blindness is due to a failure in perception or simply
an act of forgetting what had just been seen (inattentional amnesia). The former seems more reasonable since it
is quite hard to forget a salient stimulus once it has been perceived but the
latter could still be possible since failure to recall something does not
necessarily mean that it was unattended (Simons, 2000).
The movies I’ve mentioned would
hint you that I’m a big Disney fan. Thanks to Disney fans all over the world
who have taken it to the next level by posting snapshots of the interesting
things they found. To get you started, you might want to try searching for
awesome links such as this to give you a clue on what to watch out
for. So there it is, be on the lookout and be amazed with your new discovery!
Senserely yours,
Tin
References:
Mack, A. (2003). Inattentional Blindness
Looking Without Seeing. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 12(5),
180-184.
Simons, D. J. (2000). Attentional capture and inattentional
blindness. Trends in cognitive
sciences, 4(4),
147-155.
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