Ira Hyman

Who they are

This page is deliberately short. The material the Why We Project has checked for Hyman is the 2010 study and where it is cited. It does not include a full biography.

Hyman is based at Western Washington University, as The Distracted Mind records when it describes his clown study. He is the first author of Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone, with S. Matthew Boss, Breanne Wise, Kira McKenzie and Jenna Caggiano, in Applied Cognitive Psychology, volume 24, issue 5.

The study compared people walking while talking on a cell phone with people listening to an MP3 player, people walking with no electronics, and people walking in pairs. In the first study phone users walked more slowly, changed direction more often and were less likely to acknowledge other people. In the second they were less likely to notice an unusual sight along their route, a unicycling clown.

The authors suggest that cell phone use may produce inattentional blindness even during simple activities that need few cognitive resources.

Key papers

Hyman, I. E., Jr., Boss, S. M., Wise, B. M., McKenzie, K. E., & Caggiano, J. M. (2010). Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24(5), 597-607. doi:10.1002/acp.1638.

Key ideas

Inattentional blindness can be studied in the field, with pedestrians, as well as with videos in a laboratory.

A phone conversation can play the role that the counting task plays in the gorilla experiment, with the unexpected sight along the route playing the gorilla.

The authors present the link between phone use and inattentional blindness as a suggestion from their two studies.

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