Tuesday 9 April 2013

The A-Z of Sports Vision - Inattentional Blindness

Some years ago I was driving along and in front of me was a van waiting to turn right into a side road. The driver appeared to be waiting for a motorcyclist coming in the opposite direction before turning. However, to my horror, he started to turn at exactly the moment the motorcyclist drew level with him. It was almost as if the van driver had been waiting for the motorcyclist before turning into him. I’m sure that wasn’t the case, but this was actually an example of “inattentional blindness”, and is a common cause of accidents between cars and motorcycles. Fortunately, in this case the motorcyclist wasn’t too badly injured. The term inattentional blindness refers to the failure to detect an unexpected object or event if attention is diverted to another task or object, even if it is right in front of the observer (Furley, Memmert & Heller, 2010). One of the most dramatic examples of inattentional blindness was demonstrated by Simons & Chabris, (1999). In a series of experiments, observers watched a video of two teams playing basketball. One team wore white shirts, the other black, and the observers had to count the number of passes made by either the white team or the black team. Partway through this task, either a woman with an umbrella or a person in a gorilla costume unexpectedly walked through the centre of the action for about five seconds before exiting the display. The observers were then asked if they had seen an unexpected object. 35% of observers failed to notice the woman with the umbrella, and 56% failed to notice the gorilla. In sport, there’s a balance between being focused on what you’re doing, and being so intensely focused on one area that you miss important information elsewhere. Because players can’t absorb all the information that might be presented to them on a sports field, coaches often guide them towards which cues to take notice of and which to ignore. The danger, however, is that this can make them blinkered and adversely affect their decision-making. Interestingly, it’s been found that expert athletes seem to prefer to pay proportionally less attention to highly likely events and more attention to less likely events (see Memmert, 2009 for an overview). In theory, this should mean that experienced athletes should be less susceptible to inattentional blindness. When Furley, Memmert & Heller (2010) studied expert basketball players, they found the phenomenon was still strong, although they were indeed not as susceptible as novice players. This indicates that predetermined plays, such as are often seen in American football, may not be the most advantageous. A less rigid approach, with fewer instructions, might actually be beneficial. Inattentional blindness can be an especially big problem for officials. In football, for instance, the referee might be distracted by some shirt-tugging, and not notice a handball, or even the ball crossing the goal line. I look forward to the day when the chant goes round the ground “You must be inattentionally blind, ref!” David Donner

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