A stranger was swapped mid-conversation, and most pedestrians never noticed the switch

Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin had an experimenter ask pedestrians for directions; while a door was carried between them, briefly blocking the view, the asker was secretly replaced by a different person. In their 1998 study, roughly half the pedestrians failed to notice they were now talking to someone new, even though the two experimenters looked and dressed differently.

— Daniel J. Simons, Daniel T. Levin, Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction — Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1998

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