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How good are YOU at paying attention? Take the test that reveals just how bad humans are at noticing obvious changes

Famous test involves watching volunteers pass basketball to one another
Count number of passes made while watching video before scrolling down
Similar test performed last week by ‘Duck Quacks Don’t Echo’ TV show
Many viewers experience 'change blindness' during these tests because humans can only focus on one thing at a time

By Ellie Zolfagharifard For Dailymail.com

Published: 15:36 EST, 18 September 2015 | Updated: 18:12 EST, 18 September 2015

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No matter how good you think you are at paying attention, sometimes, even huge changes around you can go unnoticed.

A classic test of this can be seen in a famous video created in the late 1990s by psychologists Dan Simons and Chris Chabris at the University of Illinois.

It shows two small groups of volunteers passing a basketball to one another. Watch the clip and count how many passes they make before reading any further.

Scroll down for video

A classic test of change blindness can be seen in a famous video created in the late 1990s by psychologists Dan Simons and Chris Chabris at the University of Illinois. It shows two small groups of volunteers passing a basketball to one another. Watch the clip and count how many passes they make, before reading any further

The experiment is one of the most famous pop psychology tests ever created because of its shocking results, according to a report in-depth report in BrainDecoder.com.

At one point, a woman in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the action, faces the camera, and beats her chest.

But around half of viewers fail to see her because they are so focused on counting the passes.

The phenomenon is known as ‘change blindness’ and we are all susceptible to it.

The famous video has come back into the spotlight following a similar test performed by the TV show, ‘Duck Quacks Don’t Echo’ on Sky1 last week in the UK.

WHAT IS CHANGE BLINDNESS?

Change blindness is a phenomenon that occurs when a change in your line of sight is introduced and you don’t notice it.

For example, observers often fail to notice major differences introduced into an image while it flickers off and on again.

It can occur because of our narrowly focused attention span. At the moment, your attention is on this sentence, which means you may not realise other things in the room around you changing.

Human attention is limited, so we have to pick and choose what we focus on, and we can really only focus on one thing at any given time, so it is that one thing that we pay attention to in great detail.

The show placed an actor in a busy square where he asked passersby to help him read a map.

As members of the public study the map, the actor is quickly replaced with another person.

Some are lookalikes, while others appear completely different – either being older or a different race altogether.

Remarkably, the majority of people in all the changes fail to spot the difference.

Dr Emily Grossman, who appeared as an expert on the show, explained: ‘We can't focus well on more than one thing at a time so often don't notice unexpected thing.’

Change blindness can even strike experts whose job it is to look for tiny differences in an image.

For instance, a study from Brigham and Women's Hospital in 2013 demonstrated how 83 per cent of radiologists fail to spot the gorilla that is in the image below - despite running their eyes over it four times on average.

Change blindness can even strike experts whose job it is to look for tiny differences in an image. For instance, a psychological study from Brigham and Women's Hospital in 2013 demonstrated how 83 per cent of radiologists fail to spot the gorilla that is in the image below - despite running their eyes over it four times

The gorilla test was conducted on credentialed radiologists at the world-famous Boston hospital.

In the study, researchers asked 24 radiologists to look at a typical lung cancer screening using the CT scans of five patients.

The first four patients scans were clean, but hidden in the stack of 239 images from the fifth patient were 5 consecutive scans showing the dancing gorilla.

To aid their research, the CT scan gorilla was 50 percent transparent and in the second it was 75 percent and in the third scan the gorilla was fully visible before fading back to 50 percent in the last two scans.

Only four of the 24 radiologists reported seeing the gorilla during the test.

The gorilla test was conducted on credentialed radiologists at the world-famous Boston hospital. Only four of the 24 radiologists reported seeing the gorilla during the test. The gorilla is circled in red