Abstract

Although human perception has evolved into a potent and efficient system, we still fall prey to astonishing failures of awareness as we miss an unexpected object in our direct view when our attention is engaged elsewhere (inattentional blindness). While specific types of value of the unexpected object have been identified to modulate the likelihood of this failure of awareness, it is not clear whether the effect of value on inattentional blindness can be generalized. We hypothesized that the combination of hunger and food-stimuli might increase a more general type of value so that food stimuli have a higher probability to be noticed by hungry participants than by satiated participants. In total, 240 participants were assigned towards a hungry (16 h of fasting) or satiated (no fasting) manipulation and performed afterward a static inattentional blindness task. However, we did not find any effect of value on inattentional blindness based on hunger and food stimuli. We speculate that different underlying mechanisms are involved for different types of value and that value manipulations need to be strong enough to ensure certain value strengths.

Highlights

  • In our daily life, we sometimes do not notice what appears in our line of sight, which is a well-established phenomenon in the scientific literature, termed as inattentional blindness

  • An additional Bayesian χ2 test revealed that it was approximately four times more likely that there was no effect than that hunger had an effect on inattentional blindness (BF01 = 4.22), which can be interpreted as substantial evidence (Kass & Raftery, 1995)

  • Whereas other types of value based on evolutionarily predetermined relevance as a threat (New & German, 2015) or overlearned value as ones name (Mack & Rock, 1998) affect the susceptibility to inattentional blindness, we did not find effects of value based on hunger and food stimuli

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Summary

Introduction

We sometimes do not notice what appears in our line of sight, which is a well-established phenomenon in the scientific literature, termed as inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness occurs when an observer fails to notice an unexpected object while being engaged in a resource-consuming task (Mack & Rock, 1998; Most, Simons, Scholl, & Chabris, 2000). Such failures occur in everyday life and can be of minimal importance (e.g., failing to notice a square on a computer screen or a unicycling clown on campus; Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie, & Caggiano, 2010) or can have tragic consequences (e.g., failing to notice a tumour in medical diagnostics; Drew, Võ, & Wolfe, 2013). Monetary value learned incidentally over a short period of time does not seem to affect whether this failure of awareness occurs (Redlich, Schnuerch, Memmert, & Kreitz, 2019)

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