response When we talked about attention, we watched the video of people in white shirts throwing a ball and were asked to count the number of passes to distract from the person in a gorilla costume walking through the middle. The gorilla is very unexpected in this scenario, because people traditionally do not dress that way when playing basketball. According to this article, you might expect our attention to be drawn to the unexpected, or for us to look longer at the gorilla and lose track of the passes. Interestingly, having our attention focused on these passes overrides our ability to recognize the unusual. Is there a threshold for when these unexpected visual stimuli would pull our attention away from other things? How obvious or crazy do they need to be? In cases of crime/danger, could this ability to focus attention in the presence of something less common be considered a disadvantage? - Reese