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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."
I usually have pretty good reaction times, and in the flash test, purely by chance (well, okay, just because, having conducted psych research myself, I like to screw with their heads) I chose the third sequence first.
I didn't see the target.
I replayed that thing about a dozen times before I finally caught it.
I suspect I missed it because "rotated 90 degrees" doesn't stand out enough to notice, with such complicated images and only a tenth of a second per image - Though I suppose using something like simple brightly colored shapes would tend to make the "graphic" image stand out unduly.
Anyway, once I finally spotted the target image in the last sequence, I nailed it first try in the first two sequences (the ones supposed to induce temporary blindness).
Then again, perhaps I just have a deep fear of fire hydrants, while bloody stumps don't really phase me.
Image set 'A' was with the target image several images after the hand.
Image set 'B' was with the target image quickly after the hand.
Image set 'C' was with the target image in the same spot as 'B', but the hand was replaced with a fire hydrant.
C is clearly the control. Well, unless you have some sort of a hidden memory of something bad (or erotic) dealing with a fire hydrant.