As Andrew said, preception skills are actively trained by those professions that depend on it. The miltary has techniques for spotting objects and motion. Oddly enought it is called scanning. An experianced policeman is very good at picking up a lot of details about what is going on that others people who are with them will completely miss.
For example:
"So here we were, a gaggle of maybe 23 people walking around the Loop. We get back, the girls were saying Did you see the dresses in the windows of Saks? The guys were saying, Did you notice how conjested the traffic was? The it came my turn. And I said 'Well, did anybody see the the guy that was fighting with his girlfriend and he was going to jump off the bridge into the river?' And the Prof says 'I didn't see that.' I said 'My gosh, they were no further than five feet from you." And I said, 'Did you see the the guy trying to get his hand in the woman's purse?' He said, 'I didn't see that!' He thought I was making it up. I said 'No. That's what _I_ saw. I'm sure that's not what you saw.'
"Nobody saw it. Not a soul. And here was this guy, we walked right past him, standing on one of the stanchions the Wacker Avenue Bridge, and he was telling this girl he was going to jump in the river and kill himself. And she was telling him not to. A few seconds later, he got down off the stanchion and they walked off. And you couldn't have missed it, I didn't think. Apparently you could--twenty two of them didn't see it.
"Seeing what's really going on--that is what they used to call 'street eyes'."
And another:
"Some coppers never learn. I don't know why; they might just be lazy. I was on the street a couple of years, and I thought I was getting pretty good at it when I happened to be asssigned to work with a guy who was--dynamite. He and I had been driving in the car for about an hour and a half, and I was just talking and he's talking to me, as partners do driving in a squad car. And he says, "Tell me something. The car that just passed us going the other way. What did the driver look like?' I says 'I don't know.' 'That's my point,' he says. 'Wake up!' Then he says, 'From now on, all the night long, I want you to tell me what the driver of the car that just passed us _looks like_.'
"This was a hell of a learning experiance. Ironically, he and I came on at the same time, but he worked for two years in a very fast district, and I worked in the Thirty-ninth, where there was nothing but a rest home."
Kevin
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