To their credit, Google’s designers have recognized the distraction caused by grabbing someone’s attention with a sudden visual change. Mr. Brin explained that Glass doesn’t flash an alert in its users’ visual field when a new text message arrives. Instead, it plays a sound and requires them to look up to activate the display. The “eyes-free” goal addresses an obvious limitation of the human brain: we can’t look away from where we’re heading for more than a few seconds without losing our bearings.
Yet experiments that we and others have conducted showed that people often fail to notice something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit in situations where they are devoting attention to something else. Researchers using eye-tracking devices found that people can miss the gorilla even when they look right at it. This phenomenon of “inattentional blindness” shows that what we see depends not just on where we look but also on how we focus our attention.
Research with commercial airline pilots suggests that displaying instrument readings directly on the windshield can make pilots less aware of their surroundings, even leading to crashes in simulated landings. Google Glass may allow users to do amazing things, but it does not abolish the limits on the human ability to pay attention.
- Daniel Simons is the author of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Yet experiments that we and others have conducted showed that people often fail to notice something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit in situations where they are devoting attention to something else. Researchers using eye-tracking devices found that people can miss the gorilla even when they look right at it. This phenomenon of “inattentional blindness” shows that what we see depends not just on where we look but also on how we focus our attention.
Research with commercial airline pilots suggests that displaying instrument readings directly on the windshield can make pilots less aware of their surroundings, even leading to crashes in simulated landings. Google Glass may allow users to do amazing things, but it does not abolish the limits on the human ability to pay attention.
- Daniel Simons is the author of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
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