Sustained Inattentional Blindness Does Not Always Decrease With Age.

Hui Zhang,Xingli Zhang,Jie Fang,Congcong Yan

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01390

Abstract

Children usually miss additional information when they focus on objects or events. This common phenomenon is termed as inattentional blindness. To explore the age-related degree of this phenomenon, we applied a motion task to study the developmental difference of inattentional blindness. A group of 7-to-14-year-old children and adults participated in Experiment 1. The results showed that there was no significant developmental difference in sustained inattentional blindness. Considering that young children’s performance on the primary task was poor, we hypothesized that the difficulty of the primary task may contribute to the negative findings. Therefore, we decreased the difficulty of the primary task in Experiment 2. Still, the developmental difference in inattentional blindness rates was absent. Overall, current results implied that the ability of a person to detect an unexpected moving stimuli does not always increase with age. The age-related inattentional blindness seems highly dependent on tasks.

Highlights

When engaged in an absorbing task, children tend to look without seeing additional stimuli
The results showed that there was no significant developmental difference of inattentional blindness (IB) rates in 7-to-14-year-old children and adults [χ2 (4) = 1.222, p = 0.874]
The results showed that there was no significant developmental difference of divided blindness” (DB) rates in 7-to-14-year-old children and adults (χ2 (4) = 5.950, p = 0.203)

Summary

Introduction

When engaged in an absorbing task, children tend to look without seeing additional stimuli They cannot detect their parents or parents’ directions when they are watching cartoons or playing with toys; they cannot perceive a car coming toward them when they are talking excitedly about interesting things (Bornstein, 1990; Fagan and Haiken-Vasen, 1997). Some researchers have investigated whether younger children are more likely to experience IB than older children (Memmert, 2006, 2014; Remington et al, 2014), and whether people who have large working memory capacities or higher fluid intelligence scores are more likely to avoid IB (Hannon and Richards, 2010; Seegmiller et al, 2011; Bredemeier and Simons, 2012; O’Shea and Fieo, 2014; Grossman et al, 2015; Kreitz et al, 2015a; Zhang et al, 2016)

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Results

Conclusion