Why Can't You See?

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.