-
READING PASSAGE 3 ( 32
points)
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40
which are based on
Reading Passage 3
below.
It’s your choice!
- Or is it really?
As we move from the industrial age to
the information age, societal demands on our
mental capabilities are no less
taxing...
We are constantly
required to process a wide range of information to
make decisions .
Sometimes, these
decisions are trivial, such as what marmalade to
buy. At other times,
the
stakes
are
higher,
such
as
deciding
which
symptoms
to
report
to
the
doctor.
However, the fact
that we are accustomed to processing large amounts
of information
does
not
mean
that
we
are
better
at
it
(Chabris
&
Simons,
2009).
Our
sensory
and
cognitive
systems
have
systematic
ways
of
failing
of
which
we
are
often,
perhaps
blissfully ,
unaware.
Imagine that you
are taking a walk in your local city park when a
tourist approaches
you
asking
for
directions.
During
the
conversation,
two
men
carrying
a
door
pass
between the two of you. If the person
asking for directions had changed places with
one
of
the
people
carrying
the
door,
would
you
notice? Research
suggests
that
you
might
not.
Harvard
psychologists
Simons
and
Levi
(1998)
conducted
a
field
study
using
this
exact
set-up
and
found
that
the
change
in
identity
went
unnoticed
by
7
(46.6%) of the 15 participants. This
phenomenon has been termed
‘
change
blindness
’
and
refers
to
the
difficulty
that
observers
have
in
noticing
changes
to
visual
scenes
(e.g.
The
person
swap),
when
the
changes
are
accompanied
by
some
other
visual
disturbance (e.g. The passing of the
door).
Over
the
past
decade,
the
change
blindness
phenomenon
has
been
replicated
many
times.
Especially
noteworthy
is
an
experiment
by
Davies
and
Hine
(2007)
who
studied
whether
change
blindness
affects
eyewitness
identification.
Specifically,
participants
were presented with a video enactment of a
burglary. In the video, a man
entered
a
house,
walking
through
the
different
rooms
and
putting
valuables
into
a
knapsack. However, the identity of the
burglar changed after the first half of the film
while the initial burglar was out of
sight. Out of the 80 participants, 49 (61%) did
not
notice the change of the
burglar
’
s identity,
suggesting that change blindness may have
serious implications for criminal
proceedings.
To most of us,
it seems
bizarre that people
could miss
such obvious
changes while
they are paying active
attention. However, to catch those changes,
attention must be
targeted to the
changing feature. In the study described above,
participants were likely
not to have
been expecting the change to happen, and so their
attention may have been
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focused on the valuables
the burglar was stealing, rather than the burglar.
Drawing from change
blindness research, scientists have come to the
conclusion that
we perceive the world
in much less detail than previously thought (
Johansson, Hall,
& Sikstron, 2008).
Rather than monitoring all of the visual details
that surround us,
we seem to focus our
attention only on those features that are
currently meaningful or
important,
ignoring those that are irrelevant to our current
needs and goals. Thus at
any
given
time,
our
representation
of
the
world
surrounding
us
is
crude
and
incomplete,
making
it
possible
for
changes
or
manipulations
to
go
undetected
(Chabris & Simons, 2010 ).
Given
the
difficulty
people
have
in
noticing
changes
to
visual
stimuli,
one
may
wonder that would happen if these
changes concerned the decisions people make. To
examine choice blindness, Hall and
colleagues (2010) invited supermarket customers
to sample two different kinds of jams
and teas. After participants had tasted or smelled
both
samples,
they
indicated
which
one
they
preferred.
Subsequently,
they
were
purportedly
given
another
sample
of
their
preferred
choice.
On
half
of
the
trials,
however, these were samples of the non-
chosen jam or tea. As expected, only about
one- third of the participants detected
this manipulation. Based on these findings, Hall
and colleagues proposed that choice
blindness is a phenomenon that occurs not only
for
choices
involving
visual
material,
but
also
for
choices
involving
gustatory
and
olfactory information.
Recently,
the
phenomenon
has
also
been
replicated
for
choices
involving
auditory
stimuli (Sauerland,
Sagana, & Otgaar, 2012). Specifically,
participants had to listen to
three
pairs of voices and decide for each pair which
voice the found more sympathetic
or
more
criminal.
The
voice
was
then
presented
again;
however,
the
outcome
was
manipulated
for
the
second
voice
pair
and
participants
were
presented
with
the
non-chosen voice.
Replicating the findings by Hall and colleagues,
only 29% of the
participants detected
this change.
Marckelbach,
Jelicic,
and
pieters
(2011)
investigated
choice
blindness
for
intensity
ratings
of
one
’
s
own
psychological
symptoms.
Their
participants
had
to
rate
the
frequency with which they experienced
90 common symptoms (e.g. Anxiety, lack of
concentration, stress, headaches etc.)
on a 5-point scale. Prior to a follow-up
interview,
the researchers inflated
ratings for two symptoms by two points. For
example, when
participants had rated
their feelings of shyness, as 2 (i.e.
occasionally), it was changed
to
4 (i.e. all the time).
This
time, more than half (57%) of the 28
participants were
blind to the symptom
rating escalation and accepted it as their own
symptom intensity
rating. This
demonstrates that blindness is not limited to
recent preference selections,
but can
also occur for intensity and frequency.
Together, these studies
suggest
that choice blindness
can occur in
a wide
variety of
situations and
can have serious implications for medical and
judicial outcomes. Future
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