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 |  Subject: Idiots: Can you spot the gorilla in this CT scan? Most radiologists couldn't  Tue Feb 12, 2013 8:51 pm | |
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Notice anything strange about the scan above?
If you didn't see the dancing gorilla in the upper right hand corner, you're not alone. An upcoming study from psychological scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston showed that 83 percent of radiologists failed to spot the animal, even though they went past it four times on average.
The authors of the study, which will be published in a future issue of Psychological Science, tested 24 credentialed radiologists -- including nine from Brigham and Women's Hospital and 15 expert examiners from the American Board of Radiology. Radiologists were asked to look at five lung CT scans, each which contained about 10 nodules or abnormalities. They were asked to click on anything strange on the scans. On the final scan, a gorilla about 48 times the size of an average nodule was placed in the upper right hand quadrant.
For comparison, the researchers also tested the same scans on 25 subjects who had no medical training. They were trained for 10 minutes on how to find lung nodules before they looked at the 5 scans.
The expert radiologists were able to find the correct nodules 55 percent of the time. However, 20 out of the 24 radiologists admitted they were unable to see they gorilla even though they scrolled past it an average of 4.3 times. Researchers also determined by eye-tracking that radiologists spent 5.8 seconds looking at the scan with the gorilla, and out of the 20 radiologists who did not see the gorilla, 12 had looked directly at it.
After being asked if they were able to see the gorilla, the radiologists were shown the slide again and asked if they saw anything unusual. They all were able to see the gorilla this time.
In comparison, none of subjects with no prior medical training were able to see the gorilla. They also were only able to spot nodules 12 percent of the time, and looked at the scans an average of 4.9 seconds.
An additional 12 non-medical professionals were shown a movie of the scans and specifically told to say whether or not they saw a gorilla, in order to determine if it was easy to spot the animal if the subject was aware of it. Eighty-eight percent of them were able to find the gorilla even though they were given less time to look at the scans than the average time spent by both the radiologists and the non-medically trained group.
The phenomenon of missing something right in front of you is known as "inattentional blindness" and was made famous in part by the "The Invisible Gorilla" experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris, an assistant professor of psychology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and Daniel Simons, a professor in the department of psychology and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. During the selective attention cognitive test, subjects were instructed to count the number of times people in white shirts passed the basketball.
More: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57568784/can-you-spot-the-gorilla-in-this-ct-scan-most-radiologists-couldnt/
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“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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