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eolecki's picture

Pop Art Quiz!

Submitted by eolecki on Fri, 10/24/2008 - 8:39pm.

I used the pop art quiz from the New York Times article as the subject of my survey.  The quiz shows a picture of many different colored squares.  It then gave the participant 3 seconds to look at the picture and then highlighted one of the squares.  When the square was highlighted it could either change colors or stay the same.  People were very surprised how hard it was to tell if the square changed colors.  I recorded everyone’s score and then asked them a series of questions. 

 

What was your score?    /6

 

Did you find it difficult to tell if the color was changing? Yes No

 

Why do you think you could or couldn’t tell if the color was changing?  What do you think you were you focusing on, the entire picture or individual squares?

 

I gave them the following excerpt from the article “Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face” from the New York Times and had them answer the last question 
Visual attentiveness is born of limited resources. The basic problem is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly analyze and still end up with a reasonable sized brain. Hence, the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated, and peeling off selected data for a close, careful view. In deciding what to focus on, the brain essentially shines a spotlight from place to place, a rapid, sweeping search that takes in maybe 30 or 40 objects per second, the survey accompanied by a multitude of body movements of which we are barely aware: the darting of the eyes, the constant tiny twists of the torso and neck. We scan and sweep until something sticks out and brings our bouncing cones to a halt.  So as you scanned the picture you did not take in the color of the individual square until it was highlighted and at that point you did not know what color the box was before, so when it was highlighted the individual square was recognized by your brain and appeared to change color. Experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time, and that anything lying outside a given moment’s cone of interest gets short shrift. The brain, it seems, is a master at filling gaps and making do, of compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.

Our spotlight of attention is grabbing objects at such a fast rate that introspectively it feels like you’re recognizing many things at once. “But the reality is that you are only accurately representing the state of one or a few objects at any given moment.” As for the rest of our visual experience, he said, it has been aptly called “a grand illusion.”

 

Do you think this is a reasonable explanation, why or why not?

 

The average score was 3.4, with the lowest score being a 2/6 and the highest a 5/6.  On average people got a little more than half of the questions right.  Everyone except one person (who got 5/6) said that they thought it was hard to tell if the color was changing or not.

I got a variety of responses for what method they used to try and see the boxes.  One person said they just focused on the black and white, that the entire picture looked different if the box changed, that she could only tell if she had just looked at the square that had changed and for most people the problem arose from trying to focus on too many squares at the same time while trying to remember the color of the square.

Everyone except for two of the fifteen found the story given in the article to be reasonable.  People who believed the articles came up with response that applied to their daily lives like not focusing on certain things or not picking up on detail.  There was also responses that said they believed it because the Pop Art Quiz supported it because they weren’t focusing on it until the squares were highlighted because there was just too much to look at.  The negative responses said that it was just guessing and chance and certain colors stuck out while others didn’t.  The second non-believer said that their brain viewed the picture as one image, not individual squares so they didn’t think the article was correct.

From collecting this data and taking the test myself, I found that I believe this information even more.  Once people were exposed to this theory they could think about their daily life and see lots of examples that support this theory.  It was very interesting to see people’s responses after the first trial because they were so surprised how hard it was to tell if the square had changed.  There is a moment of unsettled, was it there before?  It just seemed to appear out of nowhere.  A lot of people just guessed for a lot of them so the average score is a little inflated by lucky guessing.  I think the reason so many people believed the article because it was a logical argument and they had no alternative idea to dispute it.  I think this survey showed that people are willing to accept the first logical argument that comes along when there is something they don’t understand.  Most of the people who I surveyed tried to connect their original answer with the article.  

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