The Relationship between Inattentional Insensitivity of Visual, Tactile, and Olfactory Stimuli

Abstract

Thirty-six participants were tested on inattentional blindness (IB), inattentional insensitivity for tactile stimuli, and inattentional insensitivity for olfactory stimuli. Inattentional insensitivity (IIS) is the inability to detect the sensation of a salient stimulus while performing a task within a congruent sensory modality. The Invisible Gorilla video (Simons, 2003) was used to test IB. Half of the participants were tasked while engaged in each sensory condition, and half of the participants were not tasked. Chi square analyses showed that tasked participants displayed more IB than nontasked participants. In addition, tasked participants in the tactile condition displayed more IIS for a salient tactile stimulus than participants who were not tasked. No differences were found between groups for IIS in the olfactory condition. High working memory (WM) participants showed better performance than low WM participants in the tactile task. High WM participants also showed better performance during the visual condition (i.e., higher accuracy for basketball counts). Finally, results suggest a possible relationship between IIS with performance across different sensory modalities.