Half the people counting basketball passes never notice a gorilla walk through the scene

In Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris's 1999 study, viewers told to count passes between players in white shirts missed a person in a gorilla suit walking straight through the game. About half the viewers never saw it at all. Attention is so narrow that something in plain sight can go completely unseen.

— Daniel J. Simons, Christopher F. Chabris, Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events — Perception, 1999

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