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View the "basketball" video
This link takes you to the basketball video from an experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris that was described in the article. To view the video, you will need to have Java active in your browser. When viewing the video, try to count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black.

Feature change video

This video was used as a stimulus by Levin and Simons (1997). In this video, a number of features change each time the camera cuts to a different position. Pay particular attention to the clothing, the objects on the table, and the positions of the actors' arms. The video contained 9 intentional changes (plus a couple that we hadn't intended). Of the 10 naive observers who viewed this film, only 1 claimed to notice a single change. That is, out of a possible 90 detections, only 1 was noticed (and that one was imprecisely described). Even when people intentionally search for changes in this video, they tend to notice fewer than 2 of the 9 changes on average.

A subject in a real-world person change event

These videos show a subject witnessing a "person change" in studies reported by Simons and Levin (1998). In this clip, an experimenter approached a pedestrian to ask for directions. While the pedestrian was providing directions, two additional experimenters rudely passed between the initial experimenter and the pedestrian. During this brief interruption, the original experimenter was replaced by a different person. Even though the two experimenters looked quite different and had distinctly different voices, approximately 50 percent of the subjects failed to notice that they were talking to a different person after the door passed. Interestingly, those who noticed tended to be from the same social group (students) as the experimenters, and those who failed to notice tended to be older than the experimenters. To explore this in-group/out-group effect, we conducted a second experiment in which the same two experimenters were dressed as construction workers. By making the experimenters members of an outgroup for the younger subjects, we were able to reduce noticing from close to 100 percent to only 35 percent.

flash video from the original Door study
flash video from the construction worker Door study

See other experiments:

http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/djs_lab/demos.html

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