We all love our fur friends dearly, but given how much time we spend with them, it’s easy for us to overlook important things that are right in front of our eyes.
To show you what we mean, we invite you to take a look at the video posted below. Silently count how many passes the individuals in white shirts make with the basketball.
How many did you count?
If you said 15, you are correct. But…
Did you see the Gorilla?
If your answer is “no!?”, then take a look at the video again, except this time don’t pay attention to passes. You’ll find that a person in a gorilla suit walked right through the video. If you missed it the first time, don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. When this experiment was done at Harvard University, researchers found that half the people watching didn’t see the gorilla either. How is it that we missed something that was so seemingly obvious?
Cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris found that when people focus on something they tend to become blind to the unexpected, like the gorilla in the video. This is called inattentional blindness. Our brains can only take on so much information from the world and only a fragment of it actually gets fully processed into our consciousness. While we feel like we see and understand everything going on around us we may be missing more than we believe. Knowing this, we have to wonder how much we miss about our dogs.
Dognition is unique because by playing the games you can learn surprising things about your dog you never noticed before, just like missing the gorilla. Many users have discovered why their dogs are so mischievous in the Cunning games, while others have found that all along their dog was using a keen logic ability to understand what their owners could and couldn’t see. Play the Dognition games for yourself and find out the previously missed genius in your dog!
