“We all have limits on our attention capacity.” — DANIEL SIMONS
Bad multitaskers blind to surprises
By Bruce Bower
People who don’t notice unexpected happenings while concentrating on a task
often have difficulty with what amounts
to mental multitasking, a team led by
psychology graduate student Janelle
Seegmiller of the University of Utah
reports in the May Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory
and Cognition.
Previous studies of this effect have
instructed participants to count the
number of times people in a video pass
a basketball to one another. Nearly half
of the viewers don’t notice a person in
a gorilla suit walking among the players, pausing for a few chest thumps and
then departing.
Why people counting passes sometimes overlook a wandering ape is poorly
understood. Explaining this effect is no
laughing matter, though, since it corresponds to real-life attention mishaps,
such as drivers gabbing on cell phones
who fail to see pedestrians in crosswalks
or red lights at intersections.
A flair for allocating attention to different objects simultaneously may help
flush out intrusive gorillas, but everyone
overlooks unexpected events on occasion,
says psychologist Daniel Simons of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “We all have limits on our attention
capacity,” says Simons, who codirected
the 1999 study that documented the
invisible gorilla phenomenon.
Seegmiller’s group first tested the
ability of 197 college students, ages 18
to 35, to solve simple math problems
and remember individual letters that
followed each problem. After complet-
ing sets of problems, the students tried
to recall, in order, the letters they had
seen.
Neandertals had
right-hand bias
Fossil tooth evidence could
be a sign of language ability
By Bruce Bower
Right-handedness reaches back a half
million years in the human evolutionary family, at least if scratched-up fossil
teeth have anything to say about it.
Stone-tool scratches on the teeth of
most Neandertals and their presumed
European ancestors occur at angles
denoting right-handedness, say anthro-
pologist David Frayer of the University of
Kansas in Lawrence and his colleagues.
Scientists have linked prevalent right-
handedness in human populations to a
left brain hemisphere that controls right-
sided body movements and functions
crucial to language. So given the new
tooth evidence, populations of largely
right-handed Neandertals and their
predecessors must have pos-
sessed a gift for gab, Frayer’s
team proposes online April
