Day 64 of 150 Pattern Difficulty 5/10
Half of people miss a stranger swap mid-conversation
Quick answer
Half of people miss a stranger swap mid-conversation. Today's question (Change blindness) asks about a finding from Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. in 1998. The correct option is Roughly half of pedestrians failed to notice the substitution — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
In Simons and Levin's (1998) 'door study', a stranger asking for directions was swapped for a different person mid-conversation behind a passing door. What did the experiment reveal?
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: B — Roughly half of pedestrians failed to notice the substitution
Simons & Levin (1998) staged a face-to-face conversation that was interrupted by two workmen carrying a door between the experimenter and the participant. Behind the door, a different experimenter took over. Roughly half (8/15) of pedestrians failed to detect the swap, even though the two experimenters wore different clothes and had different heights and voices. This change-blindness result challenged the intuition that we maintain rich, detailed visual representations of everything we attend to. Instead, perception is sparse and gist-based — we encode just enough to support the current task, and large mid-event changes can pass unnoticed when attention is briefly disrupted.
About the source
Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5(4), 644–649.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
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