Paris is truly one of the cultural centers of the world. Packed into its city limits are monuments galore, which tourists flock to in droves from all over the world. Crowded around such landmarks as the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower, tourists stand amazed by the beauty and historical significance that is displayed. Within these masses, tourists constantly reach into their pockets to snap a picture with their cell phone, parents look for their child that has seemingly disappeared into the crowd, and overzealous couples get far too intimate in front thousands of people. After all, what’s more romantic than French kissing in Paris while a 6-year-old boy and his family watch? Accompanying the interpersonal chaos, are the calls of street vendors selling “Beer, Beer, Wine, Champagne!” and “Five miniature Eiffel Towers for One Euro!” and the smells of crepes cooking in small stalls nearby.
Classmates in front of the Eiffel Tower not attending to their belongings!
This symphony of sensation represents what many people, from newlyweds to elderly tour groups, deem to be heaven. However, these sites are heaven for another group of people. A group of people tourists are less than keen on encountering: pickpockets.
Despite their conniving practices, pickpockets actually rely on several fundamental principles of neuroscience to execute their forays into hapless tourists’ pockets and purses. Chief among these principles is selective attention, or one’s ability to focus their awareness on a single stimulus, thought, or action, while simultaneously ignoring irrelevant stimuli, thoughts and actions (Gazzaniga et al., 2013). While the brain’s ability to prioritize what it attends to is appreciated as one tries to take in the beauty of the Eiffel Tower while simultaneously ignoring THAT couple. This prioritization can also be a detriment. For instance, as a person concentrates their attention on the Eiffel Tower, their attention is no longer on their back pocket. This phenomenon is called inattentional blindness and can be summarized as the brain’s propensity to miss additional information when it focuses on an object (Zhang et al., 2018). This disparity in attention provides pickpockets with the perfect window to abscond with your belongings.
Another aspect of inattentional blindness that should worry tourists is its correlation with perceptual load (Remington et al., 2014). Perceptual load refers to the amount of task-relevant information in a given task (Remington et al., 2014). For instance, in tasks with high perceptual loads, such as gazing at the Eiffel Tower while also navigating through a crowded and noisy environment, there is a higher occurrence of inattentional blindness than when completing with lower perceptual loads (Remington et al., 2014). The Remington research group conducted a study across age groups ranging from 7-8-year-olds to adults in which they introduced irrelevant visual stimuli during a visual memory task of varying perceptual loads. Across most age groups, increasing the perceptual load of a task resulted in a decrease in the ability to report irrelevant visual stimuli (Remington et al., 2014). These disparities were especially notable in adolescents, as most children noticed irrelevant stimuli 30% less while experiencing higher perceptual load (Remington et al., 2014). Interestingly, 9-10-year-olds displayed minimal inattentional blindness during higher perceptual loads (Remington et al., 2014). Comically, the researchers dispelled the notion that 9-10-year-olds are especially adept at paying attention by saying that – shockingly – the 9-10-year-olds were never paying particularly astute attention, even in the low perceptual load task (Remington et al., 2014). So, moms, don’t trust your nine-year-old with protecting your Louis Vuitton bag from pickpockets.
A graph demonstrating the differences in the percent of irrelevant objects noticed during an intermediate perceptual load and a low perceptual load scenario (Remington et al., 2014).
However, adult brains are not infallible when it comes to attending to information from multiple sources. In 2018, Hui Zhang’s research group used a similar task to that used by Remington et al. to investigate whether there were significant differences between inattentional blindness in children and adults. In their research, over half of the participants, regardless of age, exhibited inattentional blindness (Zhang et al., 2018). Additionally, their research showed that there were no significant differences between levels of inattentional blindness in adults or children.
Ultimately, the research studies of the Remington and Zhang groups complement each other nicely in that they each elucidate different factors of an individual’s susceptibility to inattentional blindness. I think that tourists should take interest in the findings that highly stimulating environments, such as Paris, increase their propensity to overlook peripheral information, and that everyone, even adults, needs to be cognizant of their surroundings at all times.
Now that I mention it, I seem to be short about 300 Euros right now … time to go file a police report!
References
Gazzaniga, M., & Ivry, R. (2013). Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind: Fourth International Student Edition. W.W.Norton.
Remington, A., Cartwright-Finch, U., & Lavie, N. (2014). I can see clearly now: the effects of age and perceptual load on inattentional blindness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00229
Zhang, H., Yan, C., Zhang, X., & Fang, J. (2018). Sustained Inattentional Blindness Does Not Always Decrease With Age. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01390
