Trafton Drew

Who they are

This page is deliberately short. The material the Why We Project has checked for Drew is the 2013 study. It does not include a biography or an account of his other work.

Drew is first author of The invisible gorilla strikes again: sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers, with Melissa Võ and Jeremy Wolfe, in Psychological Science, volume 24, issue 9. The title borrows the gorilla from the 1999 experiment of Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.

In the study, 24 radiologists performed a familiar lung-nodule detection task. The image of a gorilla, about 48 times the size of an average nodule, was inserted in the final case. The abstract reports that 83 per cent of the radiologists did not see it, and that eye tracking showed most of those who missed it had looked directly at its location.

The setting answers a question the video experiments leave open, which is whether the effect belongs only to untrained observers watching a screen. The observers here were expert searchers working at their own task, and the effect was present.

Key papers

Drew, T., Võ, M. L.-H., & Wolfe, J. M. (2013). The invisible gorilla strikes again: sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1848-1853. doi:10.1177/0956797613479386.

Key ideas

Inattentional blindness appears in expert observers working in their own field.

The gaze can reach an object that is not registered, which separates the effect from a failure of eyesight.

The study uses a familiar professional task as the main task and an unexpected image as the object, the same three-part design as the video experiments.

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