Why We Miss Objects That Are Right in Front of Us

In the study, the object was either absent, presented at scale or featured at four times scale.

Humans missed giant objects about 13 percent more than normal-sized objects, the researchers found. Scale had no impact on machine performance.

“We were surprised about how compelling of an effect it is,” said Miguel Eckstein, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Vision and Image Understanding Laboratory and one of the authors.

In particular, the first time a person examined a photo with a giant object, the object often seemed to be invisible. But it’s not a deficiency, he said: “This is a useful trick the brain does to rapidly process scenes and find what we are looking for.”

It is unlikely, in real life, that you’ll be required to find many giant objects.