Perception and Inattentional Blindness

First, before reading any further, see if you can correctly count the number of times people wearing white shirts pass the ball. 



By now I'm sure almost everyone has already heard of this.  However, about half of the people that are not familiar with this will miss something « obvious ».  We simply can't process everything around us so we have to learn to pick and choose what we pay attention to.  This is something I've thought off and on about for a long time in different ways, and I thought I would start off posting about it with this striking example.

The wikipedia page on perceptual blindness has plenty of examples of missing something in plain sight. 

When I was a kid I used to like to play capture the flag.  There were obvious ways to hide like wearing camouflage and staying behind objects.  One time however I was crossing a stream and walking up the bank on the other side, it had lots of sticky mud and medium-large round stones to navigate over on the bank.  I realized that I had been looking straight down at my feet to keep my balance and avoid twisting my ankle or getting stuck in the mud and would have missed anyone hiding off to the side; so I hid off to the side and it worked like a charm.  Later people asked how I managed to appear right beside them.  I used this, objects or situations drawing people attention away--people tend to look at certain points in certain directions--many times after that in various ways (it's easy to do, just keep a mental map of where your attention is directed and hide in the blank spots--in fact I have purposely tried to break these habits in order to notice new things).  However, I also wonder if another layer of misdirection could be added so that, if something drew away enough of a persons cognitive attention (like talking on a cell phone and not realizing you're driving like a moron), perhaps they wouldn't notice you, or something, even if you, or an object, were obvious and in plain sight.