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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe the article makes this claim. It's not about people actually ignoring the skyscrapers, but rather the low-level layers of the brain tagging them as not worth looking at. This sounds plausible - glassy skyscrapers look a lot like the sky, which isn't very interesting to look at.

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No, this is wrong. In reality there's no link between the claim in the article and the way that the human visual system processes its input. The article is trying to make a leap between the output of some algorithm, and what the human visual system does.

Meaningless.

I guess there is no disagreement. The evidence is indeed worthless.

Still the hypothesis is interesting and plausible. Maybe there is a way to test it more rigorously, this time based on actual eye tracking.

3M put out a validation study[1] of their algorithm, an algorithm explicitly created to simulate what the eye does, and it seems to do ok compared to real eye tracking data in the example shown.

Where is your evidence that it was all completely faked?

[1] http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...

They strapped people with a headset that tracks their eyes and told them to look at something. The brain will naturally then try to find the special thing the wearer thinks the researchers want them to look at to get a good result. Probably the sky, not the boring buildings.

no. they used a smartphone app that is trying to predict where people would look.

It's a smartphone app in the same sense that any app frontend is a smartphone app: a not very relevant sense.

You can find some more details in their validation study: http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...

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