Wahrnehmung
10 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- A warm lecturer also looks more attractive. Same man, same face.
In 1977 Nisbett and Wilson showed students two videos of the same lecturer with a Belgian accent: once friendly, once …
- Every decision under uncertainty has four possible outcomes.
Hit, miss, false alarm, correct rejection: signal detection theory, born from 1950s radar research, separates two …
- Half the viewers missed a gorilla walking through the frame.
In 1999 Simons and Chabris showed a video of players passing a basketball. The task: count the passes. Meanwhile a …
- Stare at one point long enough and your surroundings dissolve.
Ignaz Troxler described this in 1804: fixate rigidly on a point and unchanging stimuli at the edge of your visual field …
- The Sun isn't yellow. It's white.
From space or high in the midday sky, the Sun shines white; its surface radiates at about 5,777 kelvin like a white-hot …
- The metal spoon isn't colder than the wooden one.
Both sit at room temperature, about 20 degrees. But your skin doesn't measure temperature – it measures how quickly …
- The person you're talking to got swapped. You don't notice.
In 1998 Simons and Levin had a stranger ask pedestrians for directions. Two workers carried a door between them and the …
- The world's most famous advertising experiment never happened.
In 1957 James Vicary claimed flashed messages in a Fort Lee cinema raised popcorn sales by 57.5 and Coca-Cola sales by …
- You cannot switch off reading, even when you want to.
When the word RED is printed in blue ink and you must name the ink colour, you stumble. John Ridley Stroop showed this …
- Your eyes can decide which syllable you hear.
Harry McGurk and John MacDonald showed in Nature in 1976: hear "ba-ba" while watching lips form "ga-ga" and you …