Strong Emotions May Cause Temporary Blindness

Iphtashu Fitz writes "Ever been watching tv when a violent image comes on the screen and you don't even notice that somebody just entered the room? You've just encountered something known as emotion-induced blindness. Psychologists at Vanderbilt and Yale Universities have determined that people can suffer short periods of blindness, up to 1/2 a second in length, immediately after seeing highly emotional images. By displaying a series of images for 1/10 of a second each they were able to determine that test subjects couldn't identify images shown immediately after very erotic or gory images. You can try this out for yourself at the flash-based test site they have set up which also contains more details of the experiments."

This explains some "eyewitness" problems

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"the fact that they never even saw the image of the building lying on its side is very significant"

Witnesses to a crime often have problems remembering what happened after a traumatic event, to the extent that they often give conflicting accounts of which direction a suspect fled. This research indicated that they might not have processed that information because of the emotional overload.

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Man, this was discovered years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

When researchers at Fox News discovered that by repeatedly displaying images of the September 11 attacks, they could blind the American public to the actions of their government for up to four years

Re:Rage?

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Blind with rage'''

Or rather, it confirms that these expressions actually come from somewhere. Many of the folk wisdows contained in various expressions turn out to contain at least a grain of truth once scientific research catches up with them.

Re:Why not "blindness'?

[BWJones]

If you want to make the effect comprehensible to Joe Sixpack,....

Yes, but they also use the term in their peer reviewed paper in addition to the popular press articles.

"Hysterical blindness" is an accepted term for a condition...

Situational awareness.

And how about those poor "stripe-blind" kittens that were reared with nothing but strong vertical or horizontal lines...

That is a form of "cortical blindness" that is real and has to do with developmental defects in the visual pathways.

Obviously, the next step is to see whether the inputs briefly shut down, or if the input is ignored because of a rush of brain activity.

$100 says it is the latter and if I were reviewing this paper, I would suggest just that experiment prior to acceptance for publication.

Re:Why not "blindness'?

[mrchaotica]

Why not 'blindness'?

Because calling it "blindness" doesn't promote comprehension; instead, it promotes confusion. Calling it "blindness" implys that there's some kind of physiological defect, which is inaccurate. "Distraction" would be closer to what's actually going on here.

It's kind of like how people like to use "stealing" to describe copyright infringement -- they're superficially similar, but not synonymous.

Generally, things should be referred to by the term that accurately describes them. Why else would we have different words to describe different things?

I can't see a sidways building in the control test

[GI Jones]

When you view the flash file, option C is the control with no "emotional" image. When I looked at C, I could not see a sideways building, no matter how many times I watched it.

I personally think that this is a bunch of crap. Requiring a person to interpret an image that is skewed should require more mental effort then a properly oriented image and would be more difficult to process when you might already be processing a gory image and questioning just what you saw.

I would like to see the test done again, but instead of a complicated image, like a sideways building, why not use a large black arrow on a white background. I think that a simplistic object like an arrow would be easier to discern and would likely be noticed and its direction easy to determine. Would a lower processing requirement make the "blindness" less blinding?

Blindness? What about simple distraction? Carnage and nudity are probably one of the few things that would make most anyone take another look at something-- just to make sure that they were seeing what they thought that they were seeing. Other things that would make a person double-take would require a context. For example, if you are sitting in your office and a horse walks by your door... you would likely have a reaction similar to seeing gore or nudity for a split second, but you can't provide a context when flashing images, so I think gore and nudity are all you are left with to evoke a "mental double-take."

What if the image wasn't gory? What if in a series of tests they made the gory image less and less discernable, at what point would the effect be eroded? What about putting in something unexpected? Place a skewed image of something easily discernable (iconic) like a sideways Captain Crunch character or an upside down Nike Swoosh. Does an image that makes you mind work harder have the same effect. How about a word... place a misspelled or scrambled word before the sideways building... does it have the same effect? What about showing someone what the sideways building looks like before showing the clips, would that have any effect?

What leads them to attribute this to emotional response? Replace the gory image with a photo of a loved one or a cute animal, is the response the same? How do they gauge an emotional response to an image?

Maybe I am missing something, but this seems like bad science to me.

Just my $0.02 --

Re:"seeing red"

[MurphyZero]

Since I am very tired, I could hardly focus on any of the pictures, let alone note which ones were sideways. One problem with their hypothesis is that the hand stood out to me not because it was a gory picture, because I couldn't even tell it was a hand or anything else for that matter, let alone gory. It stood out because of the red. Due to image persistence and the short time frame, I never had the chance to see the next picture before the following picture was presented. Instead of trying to link this experiment to psychological reasons of emotions, perhaps art students should be in charge and apply it to psychological reasons of attention grabbers--maybe marketing students would also be interested.