Have you wondered about what type of attention you have?
Do you have selective attention or general attention abilities?
What are the differences with selective and general attention?
The wide, finite resource for information processing, which includes focus and awareness, is attention.
The capacity to block out distractions in order to concentrate on a single task, such as listening to a friend in a noisy environment, is known as selective attention.
To find out if you have selective attention, please watch the following video (just over a minute long).
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons 1999 decided to set up an experiment which would highlight what percentage of their sample had good attention to detail (selective attention).
Over the next 1m 22secs, count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball to each other.
Did you see the Gorilla wandering around?
Around 50% of people miss the gorilla wandering around while the players pass the ball to each other.
The video is designed to show how people miss unexpected events when focused on a specific task.
By having Selective Attention, also known as inattentional blindness, what the invisible gorilla study shows is, that if we are paying very close attention to one thing, we often fail to notice other things in our field of vision, even very obvious things.
Further examples may be, when reading a book, even in a silent place, you must pay selective attention to the pages and text, while ignoring any background noise or motion in your surroundings.
Have you tried to listen to a friend talk while in a busy bar or restaurant, with so many other voices talking at once?
It is very difficult to concentrate on your friend and what they are saying, that is unless you have selective attention.
There are positives of having selective attention, these include:
Enables individuals to concentrate on particular things.
Allows specific function of searching for target.
Shuts out irrelevant information.
Improves productivity, and enhances the memory.
The negatives of selective attention include:
Overlooking other information that may be relevant, ie critical information.
Not seeing the bigger picture.
Memory inaccuracies.
Failure to notice changes in the environment or situation, as focus is very narrow.
To finish this post on selective attention, how about another fun test?
A video involving paper cups, sets out to test our attention. Play the following and find out how you get on.
I was half expecting something out of the ordinary to happen, and as my attention was not 100% on the cup each question I found I was distracted. How did you find this video?
Did you see the changes happening in real time?
I would be interested to read about your experiences with the videos.
Thanks for taking part
Steve
References:
Simons, D. (2010) Selective attention test – Gorilla
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo (Accessed: 11 March 2026).
Simons, D. (2010) Selective attention test with cups – re-created by Marissa (Webb) Smith (2018)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bnnmWYI0lM (Accessed: 11 March 2026).
Reminds me of the BBC version of Sherlock Holmes and his famous expression:
“you see but you do not observe!”
The gorilla was a bit obvious (to me) and I was able to keep track of the cups in both following tests, but like most, the duck went un-noticed, as did the colour change, but the 5th hand threw me, I didn’t know what it was until the end when it was made clear, but I was momentarily distracted and nearly lost track of the cup.
Perhaps we all have a mix of attentions and tend to switch depending on the circumstances? I am reasonably detailed focussed, (much to my wife’s and daughter annoyance) trained to focus , listen and observe, but surprised I missed the ducks etc.
Maybe there is a “limit” to which most of us can focus, no matter how good we might think we are.:>)