The strange case of an invisible gorilla has scooped the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for Psychology, with dropped food and country music being honoured in other categories. The prizes, for achievements that "make you laugh, then think", were handed out on Thursday at Harvard University, Massachusetts.
The work that earned the psychology prize was written up in a paper entitled "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events" (Perception, vol 28, p 1059), by Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard.
They asked volunteers to count the number of times a group of people in a video threw a basketball to each other, and then asked what else the volunteers had seen. Oddly a large fraction had not noticed a woman in a gorilla suit walk through the scene, and those asked to make a more demanding count were even less likely to see the gorilla.
Some of the audience also missed the gorilla when the video was replayed, but no one missed it when it walked on stage while Simons and Chabris were giving their acceptance speech.
The Ig Nobel prize in Public Health went to Jillian Clarke, now a student at Howard University in Washington, for testing the validity of the idea that dropped food is safe to eat if it has spent no more than five seconds on the floor.
In tests with floor tiles deliberately contaminated with E. coli, she found that gummy bears and fudge-striped cookies picked up the bacteria in less than five seconds. However, tests on real floors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she worked failed because they had no detectable bacterial contamination - suggesting the cleaning staff might deserve their own award. Other research suggests the question is far from closed.
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2004-10-01, 12:28 PM
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