Hayley Cullen

With kidnapping, I think, you know, we get the audience to think about it.

When they hear kidnapping, they probably think, stranger comes up to child, child makes a fuss, kicks and screams, kidnapper pulls them into their van, drives off.

But that mental representation we have might be very different to how kidnapping actually occurs.

So inattentional blindness, it sounds like a complicated term, but it's pretty simple.

It's essentially looking without seeing.

So it's the idea that when you're focusing your attention on something specific, you can fail to notice other very obvious and important things in your environment.

So for a witness, if they're focusing their attention on driving or watching their kids at the park or something very specific, a crime might actually happen in front of them that they just don't even notice at all.

There was a case in Boston of a police officer, Kenny Conley, and he was called to the scene of a crime in a park one night.

He arrives at the scene, he sees the suspect and he pursues them on foot.

and he was brutally assaulted.

This happened just metres away from Kenny Conley as he was running past, and he claimed that he didn't notice this crime occurring because he was so focused on pursuing who he thought the suspect was that he didn't see this happening at all.

Now, a lot of people doubted this claim that Kenny Conley gave, but researchers in the United States led by Chris Chabris, they actually conducted a study where they tried to simulate the conditions of the Kenny Conley case.

So they had participants who they took to this park

And they had them complete a counting task that, you know, they were running along a path, counting the number of times someone in front of them touched their head.

So just a basic task.

And they simulated the assault off the path, like what happened in Kenny Conley's case.

And they found that around 50% of people didn't notice the crime.

So when they replicated the known facts of Kenny Conley's case, it seemed like a highly plausible thing that he was claiming.

There's been research since then that does show that, you know, when you get your participants to complete some kind of task, like they might be counting something or watching for something specific in a scene, they might fail to notice a theft or a physical assault or something like that.

it is very hard to find good predictors of whether someone would notice a crime or not.