Gorilla Academy: Gorillas we have missed: Sustained inattentional deafness for dynamic events

This experiment uses binaural auditory stimuli to investigate inattentional deafness (i.e. the absence of attention can leave us ‘deaf’ to auditory stimuli that are very obvious under normal listening conditions).

This experiment plays an audio scene where one conversation between two women is presented at the same time as a different conversation between two men. Halfway through this scene, an additional male character walked through the room, continually repeating the phrase ‘‘I’m a gorilla’’. Half of the participants were asked to listen carefully to the women’s conversation in order to answer some subsequent questions. Following presentation of the scene, participants were asked two questions: (1) Did you hear anything unusual that didn’t fit in with the scene? (2) Did you hear anyone other than the four people preparing for the party? They responded to these questions by pressing ‘yes’ or ‘no’ buttons. Following a ‘yes’ response to either question, participants were asked to give more details about what they had heard via a text entry box. The results show that people who listened to the women's conversation did not notice anything unusual whereas people listening to the men's conversation did.

If you want to see how I created this experiment, organised and analysed the data, you can enroll for the following Udemy course - Research Methods Using Gorilla Experiment Builder

This is a replication of Dalton & Fraenkel (2012).

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