Inattentional Blindness &

Conspicuity

December 7, 2011

Shell – Road Transport Forum

Edmonton, AB

Boston – January 1995 – The Story of Officer Kevin Conley

The case of Kenneth Conley began late one night in January of 1995, after the Boston police department got a radio call that an officer had been shot and four black suspects were fleeing by car.

Cops were flying in from all over. There were more than 20 cruisers involved at different points in the chase.

The police cruisers followed the suspects all over town, until finally the chase came to a screeching halt at the end of a cul-de-sac, and all four suspects jumped from the car to run in different directions.

Boston – January 1995 – The Story of Officer Kevin Conley

The first officer out of his car to chase the fleeing suspects was an undercover policeman named Michael Cox. Cox was a black officer who worked in the gang unit, he was not in uniform, but in plain clothes.

In the dark and the chaos of the night, a group of officers getting out of their cars mistook policeman Cox for Robert Brown one of the fleeing suspects, and went after him.

Suddenly Cox is hit in the head from behind, and the other officers come in and everely beat him. He's kicked in the head, and beaten on all fours.

Boston – January 1995 – The Story of Officer Kevin Conley

Officer Kevin Conley was also one of the first to arrive and he spots Robert Brown making a getaway and decides to go after him. He leaps from his car and gives chase, and in his pursuit, runs directly in front of the beating of Cox.

There is some controversy about exactly how close Conley came to the beating, but all parties agree that he was fairly close.

Shortly after Conley ran by, the police officers beating Cox realized that they had made a terrible mistake, and the beating stopped. But the officers didn't rush in to help their victim.

Boston – January 1995 – The Story of Officer Kevin Conley

As you might expect, this became a huge scandal. There were investigations and more investigations but no police officer would talk. None of the officers present that night would admit that they had participated in the beating of Michael Cox. No officer would admit they'd even SEEN the beating of Michael Cox.

There were between 20 and 30 police reports written that night. And they all said, 'I was over here, I don't know what happened, I didn't see anything, all I know is that we found Mike there.“

The only person to admit to being near the beating was Conley. He told everyone he was right there. But like the others, he insisted he hadn't seen a thing. Conley kept saying over and over again, 'I didn't see anything, I don't know why I didn't see anything, I wish I had seen something!“

Boston – January 1995 – The Story of Officer Kevin Conley

Officer Kevin Conley was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. At trial he was convicted and sentenced to 34 months in prison.

Why do you think Officer Conley was convicted? What do you think the jury believed? What do YOU believe?

Definition

Inattentional Blindness: When people fail to see something readily apparent due to their attention being focused elsewhere. Not to be confused with “unintentional”.

Enter the Psychologists

When psychologists Chris Chabris and Daniel Simons first heard about Conley, they were intrigued.

They do research on inattentional blindness and in Conley they felt they had found a compelling example.

They started pointing to Conley's case in lectures, and writing about him in their books. He became their poster child.

But through all this, both say, there was always a little nagging worry. Chabris says most of their research on inattentional blindness is done in a lab, in front of computers. "And I had always worried that the generalization we were trying to make that the Conley case was a real-world example of inattentional blindness might not be true," he says.

The Crime Simulation

To simulate Conley's focus on the fleeing suspect, Simons and Chabris gave their undergraduate volunteers very specific instructions.

The subject in the study was supposed to follow behind a jogger at a fixed distance and count how many times the jogger touched his hat.

The purpose of this was to maintain the focus of their attention, just as Conley was focused on the suspect he was chasing to make sure he didn't pull a gun or throw something away.

Then about a minute in the run, slightly off to the side, Chabris and Simons had three students stage a fight.

The question was whether the students would see the fight, and under the conditions — nighttime — that most closely resembled Conley's experience. How well do you think they did?

The Crime Simulation

The numbers were shockingly low. "Only about one third of the subjects reported seeing the fight that we had staged," says Chabris.

And broad daylight didn't cure the problem. In the light of day 40 percent still didn't notice the student being beaten.

Conley was the sole officer convicted after the 1995 beating of Michael Cox. His 34-month sentence for perjury was eventually overturned in 2004 after it became clear that the government had withheld documents helpful to Conley's case. Conley rejoined the Boston Police Dept in 2006 and works there today.

Chabris points out that our inability to absorb visual information coupled with our mistaken belief that we actually are able to absorb a lot of it influences all kinds of behavior.

Can Inattentional Blindness Happen To You?

Let’s try a little experiment

Count how many times the players in white pass the Basketball.

Insert videos here.

Everyone is inattentionally blind

 Very little of the sensory information registered by our bodies contributes to perception, with most going unnoticed. Everyone is inattentionally blind to almost everything during every single moment of every day. Most people falsely believe that they seldom experience inattentional blindness because they are unaware of being unaware.

 DON’T PANIC: Inattentional blindness should be viewed as generally a good thing. It is the price we pay for the gift of attention. Paying attention to one thing means that we don't pay attention to everything else. Without this ability to block out the irrelevant, we could not function.

Why do intelligent, diligent and thorough people so often fail to see the obvious?

Item: A nurse pulls a vial from a medication cart. She looks at the label, fills the syringe and then injects the patient. The patient receives the wrong drug and dies.

Item: A submarine commander looks through his periscope and sees no ships nearby. He orders the ballast blown and the submarine to surface. He then hears the clank of a ship hitting his deck and realizes that he has surfaced with another ship directly overhead. The ship overturns, killing 9 people aboard.

 Item: An Eastern airlines pilot and his fellow officers see a bulb flashing on the control panel. They become so concerned with the cause, that they don't notice the plane approaching the ground or hear the alarm. The crash kills over 100 people.

What is the Standard Response to These Incidents?

The person making the error is likely to be held negligent.

While assigning blame and deeming someone as careless or negligent might provide emotional relief, it does little to explain why such accidents are so common.

We All Can “Look” Without “Seeing”

Let’s try a little experiment…

Inattentional Blindness is Affected by Four Factors:

Conspicuity – the ability to capture your attention

Mental Workload – the more attention we focus on one task, the less attention there is for other tasks

Expectation – A filter of what is important / relevant

Capacity – How many balls can you juggle at one time

Two Types of Conspicuity:

Sensory Conspicuity: (Physical Properties of an object)

Most important factor is CONTRAST

We are more likely to notice objects which are large and which move or flicker

Two Types of Conspicuity:

Cognitive Conspicuity:

We are much more likely to notice things which are relevant to us in some way.

A classic example is to imagine yourself in a crowd of people and having a conversation with someone. You understand the words of your partner and may or may not also be aware of the buzz of other, unintelligible conversations. You do not have the capacity to interpret both your partner's "sounds" as well as those of other conversations in the room. Attention limits us to one conversation at time.

Mental Workload / Task Interference

Since attention is roughly fixed, the more attention we focus on one task, the less there is for others. Any mental workload, such as just thinking about what to make for dinner, can also reduce available attention.

Inattentional blindness often occurs because part of our attention is devoted to some secondary task. For example, speaking on a cell phone, adjusting a radio, or carrying on a conversation with someone in the back seat can absorb some attentional capacity and lead to inattentional blindness.

And it goes the other way, too…

Ironically, inattentional blindness can be caused by too little mental load. When confronted with a monitoring task where the chance of an important event is low, people become bored, and they cease paying close attention. Arousal level drops and attention wanders. People may also go on "autopilot" when performing highly practised tasks, such as driving.

 

Incidents

The advent of sophisticated computer technology has increased the problem. Pilots, machine operators and others who "control" powerful equipment spend more time as spectators, merely watching as computers do the actual work. They become increasingly reliant on the technology and are less likely to notice an abnormal event.

A Continental flight barely avoided disaster when it plunged 12,000 feet due to wing icing. Prior to the incident, the captain was sitting with his foot up on the console. With autopilot, it is often "set it and forget it."

The pilots of the Eastern Airline flight were so interested in the panel light that they failed to notice the plane going down. The pilots came to depend so greatly on technology, that they quit using their own senses.

 

“Expectation” a filter of what is important

Expectation has a powerful effect on our ability to see and to notice.

The submarine captain had learned that if there were no blips on the sonar, then there should be no ships in view.

The nurse was used to picking out the same size and shape bottle that contained a different drug.

Confirmation Bias

Is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or preferences, and to reject those that do not.

There are some amazing instances of confirmation bias in accident cases. A ship carrying 1500 people ran aground because the GPS was in the wrong mode, and the crew, for 34 hours, failed to notice that the screen contained the wrong information. Moreover, they simply ignored the presence of lights and buoys located in the wrong places. One crew member appears to have imagined a buoy being in the "right place" even though it wasn't really there - just because he expected it to be there. Expectation not only makes us miss what is there, but it can make us see what is not.

Capacity

Attentional capacity varies from person to person and from time to time. It is lessened by drugs, alcohol, fatigue and age. Under these conditions, the likelihood of noticing important events declines.

Attentional capacity is also a function of experience. When we learn to perform tasks "automatically," we seemingly need no longer pay attention to them and can focus on other matters.

However, automatic response can also lead to disastrous results. Recently, a fire started in one of an aircraft’s engines, so the pilot flipped the switch to cut the fuel supply. However, this new plane had a slightly different switch. The same physical motion which set the switch to "off" in his old plane caused the fuel flow to increase in his new one. Naturally, the engine burst into a massive fire. A beginner, who would have to think about the switch and read the settings, would probably not make that error.

Conclusions

Inattentional blindness is a natural consequence of our adaptive mental wiring. We are able to consciously perceive a small percentage of the available information that flows into our senses and are blind to the rest. The rules used by the filter (meaningfulness, conspicuity and expectation) are adaptive and usually work very well.

Sometimes, however, they lead to tragedy...

Conclusions

It is difficult to reduce errors due to inattentional blindness.

One reason is that people are unaware of the blindness.

Training mainly affects conscious, voluntary behavior, so it helps little. You can tell a driver to be sure to check the oncoming lane before turning, but the advice will do little good if the driver is looking for a specific address, is in a hurry and in an unfamiliar part of town.

Conclusion

There was a case where a paramedic became involved in a fatal accident because he was confused about directions and failed to see a pickup truck coming toward him down the opposite lane.

He had just come off a training course on driving the ambulance.

Discussion

•Identify tasks in your business where employees may (or have) become “Inattenionally Blind”.

•Can you come up with a possible incident where inattentional blindness may have been a contributing factor in your incident.

•Share your ideas with the rest of us!