Can You "See a Situation as It Is"? (Continued)

In my previous post, I described a study cited by author Tom Vanderbilt in his book Traffic. The study dealt with a category of traffic mishaps called "looked but did not see" accidents, in which automobile drivers failed to see motorcyclists primarily because the drivers were scanning the road for other cars and were not expecting to encounter cyclists.

I generalized from this study to observe that much of our perception - not just in the traffic context - results from the expectations we bring to a situation rather than from our processing what's actually in front of us.

So how well can you process what's actually in front of you? I invite you to run the following video to find out:

Did you "master" the test? If so, congratulations! If not ... then the next time you take to the freeways - or to the meeting room - consider how much you may be missing due to the thoughts, assumptions, and expectations that come between you and the real situation before you.