Selective Inattention

    We are amidst a very exciting unit (and if you can't sense my sarcasm, then please do so as quickly as possible) dealing with perception and sensation, where we are learning about sensation, a process by which sensory receptors receive stimuli that change the energy flow (through transduction) into a neural impulse for our brains to interpret.
    I wanted to focus on selective inattention. Selective inattention can be described by the following example. You are watching at a movie theater watching a very intense movie that you have been anticipating for a while. During the movie, a man in the theater faints and people are screaming and calling 911. However, the movie is still playing, and as a movie-addict, you don't realize a man is having a heart attack in the theater because you are so focused on the movie. Selective inattention can be defined as follows: when you are so focused on one thing, you tend to not focus on other details going on elsewhere. Another concept that goes along with selective inattention is change blindness. Change blindness says that humans are so confident that we see everything but we will often not realize a change elsewhere. What I find so fascinating about this concept is demonstrates the human tendency to display overconfidence. In a video shown by Mrs. Perl in class, we were asked to count how many passes total thrown by several females as they tossed a ball. Most people counted the correct number, but very few noticed that while they were passing the ball, a gorilla walked in and the curtain behind the females switched colors. Everyone in the class was so confident we were correct about the total passes, that we were blind, so to speak, to the rest of the details.