Wellington researcher Melanie Takarangi and former Victoria University student Seema Clifasefi have shown that people given a stiff vodka tonic failed to notice a gorilla walking through the middle of a basketball game.
"Even having one stiff drink can make you blind drunk," said Ms Takarangi, of Victoria University, in a joint report on the research with Ms Clifasefi and Jonah Bergman from the University of Washington, in the United States.
Ms Clifasefi previously studied for a PhD at Victoria University.
The researchers tested people focused on the task of counting the number of basketball passes in a video.
People who had a cocktail were twice as likely as non-drinkers to fail to notice a woman in an ape suit who suddenly walked to centre screen, beat her chest and departed – a nine-second appearance.
The psychology experiment, published yesterday in the scientific journal Applied Cognitive Psychology as `Blind Drunk: The Effects of Alcohol on Inattentional Blindness', tested only 46 people, but the researchers said it could have implications for drink-driving laws if a bigger experiment showed similar results.
The subjects were volunteers between 21 and 35 years old and half were given plain tonic water to drink but the rest were given enough alcohol to lift their blood-alcohol level to 0.04 percent.
They were each shown a video of two three-person teams passing a basketball and asked to count the number of passes.
Only four of those who got vodka, or about 18 percent, saw the gorilla.
Of the tonic-only crowd 11, or about 46 percent, spotted the ape.
The results suggested that mildly intoxicated drivers, focused intently on their speed to keep from being stopped by the police, might not see pedestrians or other vehicles, the researchers said.
A 1999 study at Harvard University used the same video to show that even without alcohol, about half of the participants missed the gorilla.
Other studies have shown that witnesses to crimes involving weapons often couldn't recall details about the assailant because they were too focused on the weapon.
2 comments:
You won't believe this... I was in Dallas in March on business. One of my sessions showed this film. Amazing to read about it here. Almost NONE of us saw the Gorilla because we were too busy counting the passing of the ball... so weird. Try and find the film, its fairly short... But surely you'll ALL see the gorilla now... He told us to count passes during the game, so we all sat and counted how many times the ball was passed... NEVER noticing the Gorilla.... (me included)... I wasn't drunk... just a tad hungover. Must have been thirty or more in the room...
Should I feel insulted that I'm being trained the same as a drunk gorilla? lol I honestly don't care, just pay me... ha
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