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I used the pop art quiz from the New York Times article as the subject of my survey.  The quiz shows a picture of many different colored squares.  It then gave the participant 3 seconds to look at the picture and then highlighted one of the squares.  When the square was highlighted it could either change colors or stay the same.  People were very surprised how hard it was to tell if the square changed colors.  I recorded everyone’s score and then asked them a series of questions. 

What was your score?    /6

Did you find it difficult to tell if the color was changing? Yes No

Why do you think you could or couldn’t tell if the color was changing?  What do you think you were you focusing on, the entire picture or individual squares?

Our spotlight of attention is grabbing objects at such a fast rate that introspectively it feels like you’re recognizing many things at once. “But the reality is that you are only accurately representing the state of one or a few objects at any given moment.” As for the rest of our visual experience, he said, it has been aptly called “a grand illusion.”

Do you think this is a reasonable explanation, why or why not?

The average score was 3.4, with the lowest score being a 2/6 and the highest a 5/6.  On average people got a little more than half of the questions right.  Everyone except one person (who got 5/6) said that they thought it was hard to tell if the color was changing or not.

I got a variety of responses for what method they used to try and see the boxes.  One person said they just focused on the black and white, that the entire picture looked different if the box changed, that she could only tell if she had just looked at the square that had changed and for most people the problem arose from trying to focus on too many squares at the same time while trying to remember the color of the square.

Everyone except for two of the fifteen found the story given in the article to be reasonable.  People who believed the articles came up with response that applied to their daily lives like not focusing on certain things or not picking up on detail.  There was also responses that said they believed it because the Pop Art Quiz supported it because they weren’t focusing on it until the squares were highlighted because there was just too much to look at.  The negative responses said that it was just guessing and chance and certain colors stuck out while others didn’t.  The second non-believer said that their brain viewed the picture as one image, not individual squares so they didn’t think the article was correct.