The Effects of Pointing out Failures of Inattentional Blindness on Performance and Situation Awareness

Abstract

Eighty-two participants were categorized into one of three groups: participants with inattentional blindness (IB), participants without IB, and participants with IB, but were told about their failure to notice a salient, although irrelevant stimulus (the Show group). The Invisible Gorilla video (Simons, 2003) was used to determine IB. The effects of pointing out IB failures were tested for subsequent tasks. Performance and situation awareness (SA) of the Show group in a subsequent task of watching driving videos was compared to the IB group and the group who did not display IB. No differences in performance were found between any of the groups. The IB group was slower to answer irrelevant questions about the driving environment than participants who did not display IB. The IB group and the Show group answered irrelevant questions slower than they answered relevant questions. However, the time to answer relevant SA questions and accuracy of answering SA questions about the driving environment did not differ between the three groups. Thus, it appears that pointing out failures of an irrelevant stimulus has no effect for improving performance or SA of relevant information in subsequent tasks. Participants were further categorized as high working memory or low working memory (WM). IB participants with low WM were slower answering SA questions than IB participants with high WM.