The Invisible Gorilla

in the Classroom:
detecting the gorilla to
enhance
understanding,
attention and learning

FELIPE FREGNISBADO, 28 DE MAYO DE 2016

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted a nice experiment at Harvard

University showing the important effect of inattentional blindness. In other words,
how sometimes we do not see important stimulus that is in front of us. What happened
in this gorilla experiment? These two researchers showed to college students a video
of students passing a basketball and asked them to count the number of passes. In the
middle of the experiment, a person dressed as a gorilla appears in the video for several
seconds. What do you think: would you notice a gorilla that walks in the middle of a
video you are watching? If you are not sure, you are correct. Only about half of
participants in this experiment noticed the gorilla (see more:
http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/...).

How come half of participants do not see a gorilla in front of them? This happens
because our brain is constantly filtering what we consider important and indeed may
block further neural processing of something as important as a gorilla. Also another
important factor is that our conscious thinking process the information in a serial
(rather than parallel) manner; therefore one conscious thought at each time: if we are
focused in counting ball passes, we do not consciously process the information of a
gorilla in front of us.
This gorilla effect has a profound effect for what we learn or miss to learn. Effective
learning is associated with the information we consciously process and how this
information is linked and stored in our brain neural network. Therefore what is
presented to students should be carefully considered. For instance, a lecture with a
heavy content will likely be minimally effective as students will miss not only one but
several gorillas. Also if the missed gorilla happens at the beginning of the lecture, then
understanding of the rest of the lecture may be hindered.

The gorilla effect is not important only when we learn but when we process
information that we learned; especially if learning is superficial. For instance,
physicians may miss gorillas when analyzing information to make a diagnosis. For
instance, if speaking to a patient, a physician thinks that a patient with a rapid loss of
weight likely has a diagnosis of a cancer will likely miss signs (gorillas) that this
patient has for instance an infectious disease that is leading to this loss of weight.
Another important example is when reading a scientific paper: it is very likely that
many readers will miss also several gorillas: the gorilla in this case would be the biases
that affect the results of scientific studies.

Going back to the gorilla experiment: how a participant in this experiment would not
have missed gorillas? Simply by preparing them to this stimulus and also increasing
the exposure and contrast of this exposure. This is what the instructors should do in
lectures: preparing students to the new information and also enhancing the contrast
when showing something novel. Though it is not easy and still it is one of the main
challenges to produce effective learning.

(The book from Hattie & Yates has a nice discussion on this topic: http://visible-
learning.org/2013/07... )