I’m sorry, but isn’t the reason that fire extinguishers are bright red, exits are clearly labeled, etc. exactly because we shouldn’t bother remembering where they are? I don’t need to store that data because, in the event of a fire, I can quickly scan my surroundings and detect the bright red fire extinguisher. Should we really be exerting effort inculcating the precise locations of things that should be easily detected under cursory examination? Instead we should just be assuring people, “There are fire extinguishers near you at all times. They are bright red. In the event of an emergency look around and you’ll find one. Until such time as that, don’t worry about it.”

It’s a compression algorithm, right? It’s much easier to remember
“Fire extinguishers look like this. They are almost everywhere.”
than it is to remember
“If I am home, the fire extinguisher is at x. If I am at work, the fire extinguisher is at y. If I am at the gym, the fire extinguisher is at z…”

This is all assuming that memory is a scarce resource and that memorizing more complex notions is somehow more costly than memorizing simpler notions. Maybe that isn’t true, in which case this would not apply. Maybe I am falling victim to the “your brain is a computer” fallacy and brain data isn’t the same as digital data.

Daniel Simons’ YouTube page:
http://www.youtube.com/user/profsimons

Daniel Simons’ TEDx talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb4TM19DYDY

DevoutCatalyst – THANK YOU for the POI reminder! Looking forward to listening.

About 60% of viewers do not see the gorilla. That means that about 40% do. No such effect is 100%.

The percentage is probably lower for people reading an article about inattentional blindness. That’s just my guess.

If you are interested there is a lot of follow up research on the factors that affect the percent of people who do or do not notice the gorilla. It’s not clear if there is something different about the 40% that notice the gorilla or if it’s just a quirky effect of that one experience. Does it mean that everyone will notice the gorilla (or equivalent) 40% of the time, or that 40% of the people will notice it 100% of the time? Probably somewhere in between.

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/index.html

Some of these are devilishly hard to spot,but once you see the difference,you wonder why you didn’t see it immediately. Very strange!

About five years ago I chanced upon an odd-ball fireman servicing the fire-extinguisher…so I was instantly able to recall where it is located, even though that was probably the last time I actually set eyes on it even though it is not hidden from view. Prior to that I was not even aware that we had one.

Sloutsky did some work on this that suggests your conclusions may be wrong about experts. In particular he concluded recall is related to categorization, and that experts may categorize and thus lose detail, whilst children (and presumably chess amateurs) see and recall the trees and not the wood (to mangle a metaphor). This could be pretty critical sort of error in medical diagnosis, in that experts might well find a likely diagnosis, and then see the symptoms that match whilst not paying attention to those that don’t.

Either way I’m sure we learn that fire extinguishers aren’t dangerous, and generally aren’t interacted with, so can be safely ignored . I know where my nearest fire extinguisher is at work, but only because it got in the way so I had to interact with it. Couldn’t tell you where the other ones are in the building, but I know there are more.