Did You Smell the Coffee? [In the Footsteps of the Invisible Gorilla]

Charles Spence (Ig Nobel Prize winner for the electronically-modified-sound-of-a-potato-chip experiment) and a colleague have a new study that explores an unexplored aspect—smell—of what’s known as “inattentional blindness.’ Inattentional blindness became widely noticed because of the “invisible gorilla experiment” that won an Ig Nobel Prize for Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. The new study asks, in essence, […]

When the gorilla met the fingernails on a chalkboard

This study tells what happened when two Ig Nobel Prize-winning experiments were combined: “Inattentional blindness for a noxious multimodal stimulus,” Joseph F. Wayand, Daniel T. Levin and D. Alexander Varakin, American Journal of Psychology, vol. 118, no. 3, Fall 2005, pp. 339-52. The authors, at DePauw University and at Vanderbilt University, explain: “Previous research has […]