Critical review: Gorillas we have missed:

Sustained inattentional deafness for

dynamic events

Evaluation

Polly Dalton is affiliated with Royal Holloway University of London and has been involved with 19
published articles. Nick Fraenkel, also affiliated with Royal Holloway University of London when the
paper was published, is involved with 3 published articles. This article was published by science
direct Eldevier.

Dalton and Franenkel (2012) present a strong rationale stating, “prevalent view of hearing as an
‘early-warning system’, tuned to detect unexpected stimuli (e.g. Scharf, 1998), it is important to ask
whether inattention can have similarly pronounced effects on auditory awareness as it does on visual
awareness.” Their rationale identifies a substantial gap in the literature that says that selective
attention and unintentional blindness has been shown but questions if it can it be replicated and
applied to auditory stimuli.

The paper uses the basis of three basic elements; Task irrelevant stimuli, task relevant stimuli and
unexpected stimuli. Participants were also asked two questions: “Did you hear anything unusual that
didn’t fit in with the scene?” and “Did you hear anyone other than the four people preparing for the
party?”, then asked to give more details about what they had heard. It’s important that the elements
and style of questioning was used as it followed the already standardised procedure of Simons &
Chabris (1999). Basing the experiment of a procedure on a well-reviewed study improves internal
reliability of the study as these three elements have been shown to be effective in measuring
inattentional deafness. Participants were then able to record their own spoken responses via a
microphone connected to the computer. This prevents social desirability causing them to fabricate
hearing a voice because they feel inferior for not finding such an unusual voice. This also helps
compensate for the leading questions which may cause incorrect recall due to demand characteristics.

Forty-five people aged between 16 and 47 participated (mean age 20). The mean age is very low,
which reduces generalisability to the wider population. However, this is beneficial as it helps removes
confounding variables in hearing because at this age there is a lower probability of people with
hearing problems, affecting the detection of the unexpected stimulus.

The addition of the second experiment manipulated the voice footage, switching the gorilla stimulus
to the women’s side of the conversation rather than the male side spatially, using the binaural
recording. This second experiment allowed them to conclude that spatial and voice category both
influenced attentional allocation and that most people failed to notice a critical unattended stimulus in
an attended conversation. This extra experiment gives more insight into influences of attentional
allocation and that the inattentional deafness can still be seen when the unexpected stimulus appears
in an attended ear. This gives other researcher direction for further research.

The binaural recording equipment captures a 3-D stereo sound sensation for the listener as if they
were in the room which the conversation is taking place, so it could be arguably applied outside the
lab setting as the conversation is made to replicate an everyday situation. An example binaural
recording was played meaning people understood the conditions and were less likely to make errors.
However, a dummy head can never fully replicate real life as we cannot have exactly the same
environment as a dummy. Also, in most conversations there is a response by the ‘participant’ so in
this sense it is less applicable to real life as the dummy would not have the same interactions as a
human.

The two women wrapping up a present with the two men preparing food and drink in the study is a
good representation of a typical conversation with people preparing for a party, adding to the realism.
As both genders are covered, this eliminates any sex related bias. To balance for any potential stereo
orientation effects, half of the participants listened to the scene with the right and left channels
reversed, creating a reversed stereo version of the scene which found no effect; this is important as the
ear to which the stimuli is inputted could have affected the recognition of the critical stimuli.

The sentence “I’m a gorilla”, was used as the unexpected stimuli. As university students were used in
the sample of this study, they may have encountered the Simons & Chabris (1999) original study that
includes a gorilla. This may influence the results as after seeing this research, participants may see
gorilla as non-irrelevant or expected stimuli which could mean they would be more likely to hear it.
However, as the very obscure phrase was audible for 19s, this suggests good manipulation of
variables, showing that the absence of attention of the unexpected stimulus caused the significantly
lower recall of the phrase. The “I’m a gorilla” phrase was also recorded in a separate take from the
rest of the scene and added in which is beneficial as it allows manipulation of the stimulus.

As both the attentional conditions (attend men and attend female) both heard instructions from a
female voice, it could be suggested that the participants in the attend male condition may have carry-
over effects meaning they could be less likely to be able to switch from attending a female voice to a
male. This could cause exaggerated effects of inattentional deafness, meaning conclusions drawn
from them are less valid. To counter this they could have used instructions with text or used male
instructions with the male condition and female instructions in the female condition.

In the results, significantly fewer participants noticed the critical stimulus in the attend women (30%)
condition compared to the attend men condition (70%), (p<0.001). The control trial found that all the
non-excluded participants heard the stimuli when told to attend the male condition, this helps to
reliably suggest high internal validity to support the conclusion that, without attention to a unexpected
stimulus participants to not detect this stimulus whist when attending a task relevant stimulus.
Appropriate use of removal was used on participants who did not hear the attended stimulus in the
control condition or experienced technical difficulties.

Implications

As this paper is cited over 75 times it shows the significance of pioneering the research into sustained
unintentional deafness under dynamic conditions.

This paper was the sustained inattentional deafness using dynamic conditions to be published in a
scholarly journal. This has helped modernise the dichotic listening task to create a more lifelike and
real experience for the participant, to see if it still has the same effect with three-dimensional auditory
scene.

Experiments that have cited this paper such as Koreimann, Gula & Vitouch (2014) have replicated
these 3D binaural dynamic conditions, finding sustained inattentional deafness in the musical scene.
Pioneering this method for inattentional deafness has helped later studies find an improved way of
testing inattention, over the dichotic listening. This method also confirms the validity of older
research using the Dichotic listening technique. This technique helps make conclusion that are more
useful and provide evidence of ecologically validity for the model of inattentional deafness.

Many older studies have focused on the extent to which the unattended message is processed without
focal attention, finding that unattended information is processed on a relatively basic level (Cherry,
1953 and Broadbent, 1958). This paper shows these conclusions are still reliable and appropriate as it
was found that significantly less people noticed the critical unattended stimulus, suggesting basic
level of processing compared to attended stimulus.

Dehais et al (2014) cited this paper in their rationale of their study of pilots Failure to detect critical
auditory alerts in the cockpit due to unintentional deafness. In their windshear scenario, where an
auditory warning occurred while the pilots handled a critical windshear, 11 of the pilots (39.3%)
failed to report or react accordingly to the alarm. This was significant as all the participants who were
in the no-windshear condition detected the auditory alert. This could be applied further than the field
of aviation, Murphy & Greene (2015) expanded on this papers research into the visual field and using
a gap perception task which significantly affected driver awareness for auditory along with visual
stimuli, even if they were safety critical and driving relevant. This shows the real-life application that
this paper and its involvement in helping to contribute to potential life saving research.

This research was based off Mack & Rock (1998) unintentional blindness study, that studied the same
concept but using visual stimuli. This paper has been part of a development in the field to
unintentional changes in different senses, inspired other senses to be explored. Polly Dalton teamed
up with Sandra Murphy 4 years later to extend her research to the tactile domain, finding detection
awareness to ovbious vibration stimuli was reduced under high visual perceptual load, compared to
low perceptual load.

This paper is yet another support for Load theory which states that awareness levels to stimuli are
determined by the availability of attentional capacity (Lavie et al, 2004). This theory states high load
on attentional capacity for task relevant functions can cause awareness of the task irrelevant or
unexpected stimuli to be very poor as the system prioritises task relevant stimuli, due to selective
attention. Fairnie, Moore & Remington (2016) extended the research into the auditory section of load
theory by founding an increasing the auditory load of the primary task consistently reduced the ability
to detect the critical stimulus. This adds to a growing body of literature demonstrating the importance
of attention in determining auditory awareness and supporting the theory behind it.

The results of this study are so influential as it shows the first promise of sustained inattentional
deafness, as it shows that a distinctive and normal phrase can remain unnoticed if not attended for 19
seconds.

References
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Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears.
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Dalton, P., & Fraenkel, N. (2012). Gorillas we have missed: Sustained inattentional deafness for
dynamic events. Cognition, 124(3), 367-372.

Dehais, F., Causse, M., Vachon, F., Régis, N., Menant, E., & Tremblay, S. (2014). Failure to detect
critical auditory alerts in the cockpit: Evidence for inattentional deafness. Human factors, 56(4), 631-
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Fairnie, J., Moore, B. C., & Remington, A. (2016). Missing a trick: Auditory load modulates
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Koreimann, S., Gula, B., & Vitouch, O. (2014). Inattentional deafness in music. Psychological
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Lavie, N., Hirst, A., De Fockert, J. W., & Viding, E. (2004). Load theory of selective attention and
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Murphy, S., & Dalton, P. (2016). Out of touch? Visual load induces inattentional numbness. Journal
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