Invisible Gorillas

The other week I was listening to a podcast. It's my newest "find" and those of you who know me will know that I can be rather obsessive with "finds" -you should see my lovely Lego collection started a few months ago... I'm still on the hunt for minifigures!
Anyway this is from the How Stuff Works: Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast and is more of a science one. I have quite a few I listen to on my travels around the countryside and one of them recommended this site. The only problem with all my podcasts is I need to start finding some schools further away so I have time to listen to them all as I travel! Here's the link:  https://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/the-obvious-invisible-gorillas-of-the-mind.htm. I don't remember if it's perfect for the children to listen to but it is interesting! As a wee squirrel... I like the ideas of children having opportunities to be immersed in science perhaps through a podcast, video or article...
The podcast was about "Invisible Gorillas", that idea that we can 'see' but actually can zone things out of our vision. A good example is driving. A few times I can sort of focus in and not really recollect earlier parts of the drive. It's not that I've fallen asleep (hopefully!) but just that my brain decided it wasn't important!
There's a couple of videos as a part of this. There's also a very funny Monty Python sketch mentioned on the podcast that took me a long time to find it and the first part illustrates this perfectly with additional cast members in the background that you don't even notice! One Invisible Gorilla clip is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo. There seem to be a few different versions out there. If you can, get the children to watch the video by themselves on their own device to limit 'Oh! Look at that gorilla!' moments. I tried to find one without telling the viewer they missed the gorilla but wasn't lucky. Ask the children who spotted the gorilla the first time. Research has shown it's usually about 50% -although there are other versions where it's even lower and that's after the viewer has already seen one video like this!
It's a good chance to talk about honesty in science -what if I don't want people to know I missed the gorilla? I might lie so I don't feel dumb. What might that do to the research? How could I find out who saw the gorilla in a way that didn't let them feel dumb. We're sort of playing a bit here in ethics. Asking the whole class at once in itself is an interesting experiment -we all want to be the same!
There's another video from a British road safety video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47LCLoidJh4. This has similar findings and interestingly, having watched one video previously doesn't seem to impact the second video's findings! What did children notice this time? As an aside you could use bit.ly to shorten the videos... I have: http://bit.ly/Paul_Gorilla and http://bit.ly/Paul_Bear.
Why would I do this? I really like the idea of opportunities for children to investigate ideas that scientists wonder, in this case, selective attention. Children could investigate a bit further -perhaps play the video to their whaanau and see what results they get -is it around the 50% mark? Are particular genders or ethnicities more susceptible to selective attention? Can we collect data and graph it? Or build up some inferences? 
Children can also dip a bit deeper with the website:  http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html. There are presentations on the websites that the children might like to watch to get some more thinking about what this is all about. But why do this? What's the point of the research? What do children think about this? Why do we have selective attention? What's the point of it? For us humans, we really don't want to or perhaps need to see everything! I'm typing this on my keyboard and if I stop, I can see the icons at the bottom of the screen or the blue 'on' light. But as I'm typing, I'm not aware of them at all! They must still be there! If I'm driving along and nothing is different as I drive through towns, my brain doesn't see the need to record the images or even notice! There are a few different articles out there including this one: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-selective-attention-2795022 that might be worth reading for those particularly interested.  
In terms of capabilities, there's lots happening here. The idea of the science capabilities is that they don't really all operate in one-off situations but together. As children carry out the investigations, do they all do it the same? Do some say "Can you see anything strange in this video?" which might lead the viewer? Do others giggle as the gorilla turns up on the screen? It gives us a chance to talk about how we could investigate scientifically and carefully. It also helps us to talk about our own questioning -how do we make sure we don't ask leading questions?
Anyway, it was an interesting podcast, and I thought it could be interesting for you too! I know this doesn't have a lot of capabilities mentioned but they're there!

Paul