Written by A classic image challenging our perceptive processes from this piece on LinkedIn by Professor Eduardo Blanco-Muñoz where he goes on to discuss the importance of salience. We reproduce the text of his post below. For the original follow the link to: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eduardoblanco_what-are-these-and-how-is-that-important-activity-7399125736705384448-vHiG/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAvfVhUBHUfK-_UZozXFJxPU-vBMJemitrs
What are these and how is that important to workplace safety?
You may have already seen this picture in social media. If so, it probably drove you crazy – I know I was puzzled for a long while.
If it’s new to you and you’re struggling, don’t worry I’ll give you the answer below.
But first, play along and try to identify these “things”.
Have you figured them out yet?
Come on, look at them there, in plain view…
You’re looking at… four forks on a purple cloth. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.
This image illustrates well the concept of visual salience, the property by which something stands out (from Latin salio, meaning “spring”). Salient objects “jump at us”.
Salience can be physical or cognitive. Because of their colour and texture, the visible parts of the purple towel in the background are more physically salient than the grey, smooth forks. So, “unidentified” fleecy purple things appear to most people – jump at us – as if they were in the foreground of this pic.
Conversely, the forks are not visible in their entirety, which hinders our ability to recognize them. Less physically salient, they seem to be the background of the image. The forks’ shadows also play a part in this illusion, providing a deceptive impression of volume to those purple fluffy “things”.
Once we know what’s there, the forks become cognitively salient. We assign them with meaning. From that moment on, we can’t help but see them. They seem so obvious that we wonder how we could not see them in the first place!
Goethe famously said that we only see what we know. But even if we know the object in front of us, if we fail to recognize it we may not notice it.
This phenomenon plays a key role in hazard recognition, a fundamental topic in human factors and occupational health & safety.
If you’re interested in these kinds of counterintuitive phenomena and how they affect occupational safety, you may want to check out my book ‘Human Factors and Safety Culture: How Leaders Can Influence Behaviours for Good’.
It takes the study of cognitive science from the top, starting with perception then digging into attention, memory, automatisms, rationality… A lot of pitfalls can be avoided just by understanding better how our mind works.
Once we own these concepts we can move on to the socio-technical and cultural level. Which is the subject of the last part of the book: to provide organizations with the tools to effectively and sustainably orient behaviours.
Blanco-Muñoz’s book Human Factors and Safety Culture: How Leaders Can Influence Behaviours for Good is available at the link:https://www.routledge.com/Human-Factors-and-Safety-Culture-How-Leaders-Can-Influence-Behaviours-for-Good/Blanco-Munoz/p/book/9781041019367
Published by CRC Press (Taylor & Francis Group) and is packed with practical human factors advice and the science that supports it.