Abstract
Inattentional blindness is a failure to notice an unexpected event when attention is directed elsewhere. The current study examined participants’ awareness of an unexpected object that maintained luminance contrast, switched the luminance once, or repetitively flashed. One hundred twenty participants performed a dynamic tracking task on a computer monitor for which they were instructed to count the number of movement deflections of an attended set of objects while ignoring other objects. On the critical trial, an unexpected cross that did not change its luminance (control condition), switched its luminance once (switch condition), or repetitively flashed (flash condition) traveled across the stimulus display. Participants noticed the unexpected cross more frequently when the luminance feature matched their attention set than when it did not match. Unexpectedly, however, a proportion of the participants who noticed the cross in the switch and flash conditions were statistically comparable. The results suggest that an unexpected object with even a single luminance change can break inattentional blindness in a multi-object tracking task.
Highlights
Inattentional blindness is a failure to notice an unexpected event when attention is directed elsewhere
On the third critical trial, an unexpected object which was visible for 5 seconds entered the display from the right side and traveled on a straight path through the center of the screen, exiting on the left side
The current study aims to replicate the findings of Most et al (2001) and examine the effects of levels of object saliency on visual awareness in a dynamic multi-object tracking task
Summary
Inattentional blindness is a failure to notice an unexpected event when attention is directed elsewhere. Participants were asked to view a dynamic visual display consisting of white and black circles and squares moving on random trajectories and to count the number of times either white or black objects deflected off the side of the display boundary while fixating at the center point of the display.
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