1: Our poor performance in visual thinking information and “Inattentional Blindness”
Our observations are based on our experience which creates preconditions/ patterns to judge a situation. It is a known fact that we build our understanding of a person within the first 20 - 30 seconds. We observe and decide if we like a person or not. That has to do with our well-trained brain from ancient times. Our intuition tells us if the person might be dangerous and we have to flee, or if the person looks sympathetic, and we trust the situation and build a relationship. We must make a conscious decision to bypass our prejudgement. To do so we have to step back, observe and question our way of looking.
A famous advertisement showing a photo taken by Don McCullin in the late 80's, shows two people running down a street. A black person is followed by a policeman. The ad asks: "Another example of police prejudice? Or another example of yours?"
What do you see? A policeman chasing a criminal, or a policeman chasing an innocent person? Wrong both times.
It's two police officers, one in plain clothes, chasing a third party.
Using that picture in an education situation can produce very different results, depending on if you just show the picture, or if some ground rules of observation and visual thinking are taught. In the latter situation, the judgement is postponed. Participants of such a group start to carefully observe the picture, and build a variety of hypotheses based on their observations. In this particular picture, they often conclude that there is not enough evidence to accurately assess the situation.
The phenomenon behind that is called "Inattentional Blindness". We see what we want to see.
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"Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice an unexpected stimulus that is in one's field of vision when other attention-demanding tasks are being performed. This typically happens because humans are overloaded with stimuli, and it is impossible to pay attention to all stimuli in one's environment". |
Beyond that, it is a matter of training and conscious decision. Amy Herman describes in her book "Visual Intelligence" many examples. For instance, it is an important rule in police work that witnesses of a crime scene do not speak to each other before their observations were written down. The moment where witnesses exchange their observations they start to influence each other. Another impressive example is that more detailed observation of patients in hospitals leads to a significant increase of empathy for the ill person.
Visual performance skills must be trained.