Abstract
People can show sustained inattentional blindness for unexpected objects visible for seconds or even minutes. Would such objects eventually be noticed given enough time, with the likelihood of noticing accumulating while the unexpected object is visible? Or, is there a narrow window around onset or offset when an object is most likely to be detected, with the chances of noticing dropping outside of that window? Across three experiments (total n's = 283, 756, 488) exploring the temporal dynamics of noticing in sustained inattentional blindness, subjects who noticed the unexpected object did so soon after it onset. Doubling or even tripling the time when the unexpected object was visible barely affected the likelihood of noticing it and had no impact on how accurately subjects reported its features. When people notice an unexpected object in these sustained inattentional blindness tasks, they do so soon after the unexpected object onsets.
Highlights
As anyone who has ever tried to get the attention of a distracted friend knows, people can be remarkably oblivious to new or unexpected events when they are sufficiently engrossed in something else
As specified in our preregistration, we coded subjects as having noticed the unexpected object if they were assigned to a condition that had an unexpected object, reported noticing something new and correctly reported either the object’s shape or its colour
44.0% of subjects in the 5 s exposure time condition noticed the unexpected object, and 38.5% of subjects in the 2.67 s exposure time condition noticed it for a difference of 5.5 percentage points
Summary
As anyone who has ever tried to get the attention of a distracted friend knows, people can be remarkably oblivious to new or unexpected events when they are sufficiently engrossed in something else. A large body of work has attempted to delimit when people will experience inattentional blindness [1], what aspects of the unexpected event affect noticing, and how engagement in a primary task matters. Is your friend guaranteed to notice you eventually if you keep waving? Most studies of the temporal characteristics of selective attention have focused on tasks in which subjects know they will have to attend to some areas or objects and ignore others; they can evaluate and establish attentional filters for all relevant aspects of the display and use those filters repeatedly across many trials. A stimulus in a search or RSVP task can be processed in something on the order of 50 ms [3] and inhibition of distractor features can begin as early as 100 ms after stimulus onset [4]
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