Inattentional Blindness Task Research Articles

Are Familiar Objects More Likely to Be Noticed in an Inattentional Blindness Task?

People often fail to notice the presence of unexpected objects when their attention is engaged elsewhere. In dichotic listening tasks, for example, people often fail to notice unexpected content in the ignored speech stream even though they occasionally do notice highly familiar stimuli like their own name (the "cocktail party" effect). Some of the first studies of inattentional blindness were designed as a visual analog of such dichotic listening studies, but relatively few inattentional blindness studies have examined how familiarity affects noticing. We conducted four preregistered inattentional blindness experiments (total N = 1700) to examine whether people are more likely to notice a familiar unexpected object than an unfamiliar one. Experiment 1 replicated evidence for greater noticing of upright schematic faces than inverted or scrambled ones. Experiments 2-4 tested whether participants from different pairs of countries would be more likely to notice their own nation's flag or petrol company logo than those of another country. These experiments repeatedly found little or no evidence that familiarity affects noticing rates for unexpected objects. Frequently encountered and highly familiar stimuli do not appear to overcome inattentional blindness.

An investigation of inattentional blindness using gaze and frequency tagging.

Inattentional blindness (IB) occurs when a salient object presented in plain sight goes unnoticed when its appearance is unexpected. Across two experiments, participants completed a classic dynamic IB task while eye movements and steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) responses were continually recorded. This allowed us to measure the modulation of gaze and brain-based indices of attention during IB. While an SSVEP response to all stimuli including the unexpected object was attained, only gaze measures were able to discriminate noticers from nonnoticers. Experiment 1 used a prototypical sustained IB task and found that gaze toward the unexpected object was largely unrelated to noticing that object. Experiment 2 manipulated the contrast of the target and distractor stimuli, and instead observed a tight concordance between gazing at the unexpected object and reporting its presence. This task-based variability in gaze deployment is consistent with the broader literature and cumulatively delineates the challenges faced in translating lab-based IB research from the bench to the bedside. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Similarity of an unexpected object to the attended and ignored objects affects noticing in a sustained inattentional blindness task.

When focusing attention on some objects and ignoring others, people often fail to notice the presence of an additional, unexpected object (inattentional blindness). In general, people are more likely to notice when the unexpected object is similar to the attended items and dissimilar from the ignored ones. Perhaps surprisingly, current evidence suggests that this similarity effect results almost entirely from dissimilarity to the ignored items, and it remains unclear whether similarity to the attended items affects noticing. Other aspects of similarity have not been examined at all, including whether the similarity of the attended and ignored items to each other affects noticing of a distinct unexpected object. We used a sustained inattentional blindness task to examine all three aspects of similarity. Experiment 1 (n = 813) found no evidence that increasing the similarity of the attended and ignored items to each other affected noticing of an unexpected object. Experiment 2 (n = 610) provided some of the first compelling evidence that similarity to the attended items - in addition to the ignored items - affects noticing. Experiment 3 (n = 1,044) replicated that pattern and showed that noticing rates varied with the degree of similarity to the ignored shapes but not to the attended shapes, suggesting that suppression of ignored items functions differently from the enhancement of attended items.

Animate monitoring is not uniform: implications for the animate monitoring hypothesis.

The animate monitoring hypothesis (AMH) purports that humans evolved specialized mechanisms that prioritize attention to animates over inanimates. Importantly, the hypothesis emphasizes that any animate-an entity that can move on its own-should take priority in attention. While many experiments have found general support for this hypothesis, there have yet been no systematic investigations into whether the type of animate matters for animate monitoring. In the present research we addressed this issue across three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 53) searched for an animate or inanimate entity in a search task, and the animate was either a mammal or a non-mammal (e.g., bird, reptile, insect). Mammals were found significantly faster than inanimates, replicating the basic AMH finding. However, they were also found significantly faster than non-mammals, who were not found faster than inanimates. Two additional experiments were conducted to probe for differences among types of non-mammals using an inattentional blindness task. Experiment 2 (N = 171) compared detection of mammals, insects, and inanimates, and Experiment 3 (N = 174) compared birds and herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians). In Experiment 2, mammals were spontaneously detected at significantly higher rates than insects, who were detected at only slightly higher rates than the inanimates. Furthermore, when participants did not consciously identify the target, they nonetheless could correctly guess the higher level category of the target (living vs. nonliving thing) for the mammals and the inanimates, but could not do so for the insects. We also found in Experiment 3 that reptiles and birds were spontaneously detected at rates similar to the mammals, but like insects they were not identified as living things at rates greater than chance when they were not consciously detected. These results do not support a strong claim that all animates are prioritized in attention, but they do call for a more nuanced view. As such, they open a new window into the nature of animate monitoring, which have implications for theories of its origin.

Single neuron evidence of inattentional blindness in humans

Recording directly from the brain of a patient undergoing neurosurgery with electrodes implanted deep in her skull, we identified neurons that change their properties when the patient became consciously aware of content. Specifically, we showed the patient an established clip of a gorilla passing through the screen, unnoticeable, in a classic inattentional blindness task, and identified a neuron in the right amygdala that fired only when the patient was aware of the gorilla. A different neuron coded the moment of insight, when the patient realized that she had missed the salient gorilla in previous trials. A third cluster of neurons fired when the patient was exposed to a post-clip question (“How many passes did you count?“) and reflected on the content. Neurons in this cluster altered their response behavior between unaware and aware states.To investigate the interplay between the neurons' activity and characterize the potential cascade of information flow in the brain that leads to conscious awareness, we looked at the neurons' properties change, their activities’ alignment and the correlation across the cells. Examining the coherence between the spiking activity of the responsive neurons and the field potentials in neighboring sites we identified an alignment in the alpha and theta bands. This spike-field coherence hints at an involvement of attention and memory circuits in the perceptual awareness of the stimulus.Taken together, our results suggest that conscious awareness of content emerges when there is alignment between individual neurons' activity and the local field potentials. Our work provides direct neural correlate for the psychological process by which one can look at things directly but fail to perceive them with the “mind's eye”.

Position-Specific Attentional Skills in Team Sports: A Comparison between Defensive and Offensive Football Players

Over the last few decades, technical as well as cognitive skills and their relation to position-specific skill requirements have been extensively investigated as indicators for players’ performance in team sports. To explore the impact of positioning in football on inattentional blindness we employed dynamic tasks that presented an unexpected object and analyzed its noticing rates in three different experiments. In Experiment 1, amateur and expert football players performed a well-established inattentional blindness task of counting the number of times a basketball was passed between two groups while an unexpected, non-sport specific object was introduced to the situation. Noticing rates were higher for strikers compared to players of other playing positions. The findings support a position-specific advantage regarding inattentional blindness for more offensive players compared to more defensive players. Using the same inattentional blindness task, this finding was investigated in Experiment 2 in more detail, i.e., by differentiating between more playing positions. Results revealed that offensive players (in particular strikers) observed unexpected objects more frequently than defensive players. Experiment 3 used a newly developed football-specific task requiring participants to find solutions in different game situations with an unexpected free-standing player appearing in one of these situations. Defensive players again showed more inattentional blindness than offensive players (in particular offensive mid-fielders), i.e., offensive players perceived the unmarked player more often. This indicates that players not only differ in the conscious perception of unexpected objects that are irrelevant to the sport as a function of their playing position, but also show differences when the perception of the unexpected relevant object is useful for finding tactical solutions in a given game situation. Our findings provide further insight into the importance of the definition of position-specific skill requirements in team sports.

Threat-relevant stimuli cannot be better detected by preschoolers in an inattentional blindness task.

Detecting the unexpected threat-relevant stimuli plays a vital role in preschoolers' daily life safety, but a few studies have investigated how preschoolers process this kind of stimuli. We applied a classical inattentional blindness task (designed by Mack and Rock Inattentional blindness. MIT Press, 1998) to explore whether threat-relevant stimuli could be better detected in an inattentional condition and whether the age and the fluid intelligence could predict the incidence of the detection. With the involvement of two hundred and thirty-nine preschoolers (aged from 4 to 6years), we found that it was not more likely for preschoolers to detect the threat-relevant stimuli (Knife and Snake) compared with the non-threat-relevant stimuli (Spoon and Snail). The age difference of detection only occurred in the divided attentional condition, but not in the inattentional condition. Moreover, the group of 5-year-old preschoolers with higher fluid intelligence scores was more likely to detect the unexpected stimuli, but the prediction was not powerful. These findings demonstrate that the threat-superiority effect on IB does not occur on preschoolers and the individual difference of preschoolers' IB is unstable. This study enriches the cognition of young children's attentional bias to threat-relevant stimuli, and has certain significance to understand the essence of children's attentional process.

Does hunger promote the detection of foods? The effect of value on inattentional blindness

Although human perception has evolved into a potent and efficient system, we still fall prey to astonishing failures of awareness as we miss an unexpected object in our direct view when our attention is engaged elsewhere (inattentional blindness). While specific types of value of the unexpected object have been identified to modulate the likelihood of this failure of awareness, it is not clear whether the effect of value on inattentional blindness can be generalized. We hypothesized that the combination of hunger and food-stimuli might increase a more general type of value so that food stimuli have a higher probability to be noticed by hungry participants than by satiated participants. In total, 240 participants were assigned towards a hungry (16 h of fasting) or satiated (no fasting) manipulation and performed afterward a static inattentional blindness task. However, we did not find any effect of value on inattentional blindness based on hunger and food stimuli. We speculate that different underlying mechanisms are involved for different types of value and that value manipulations need to be strong enough to ensure certain value strengths.

Can Motion Graphic Animation About Snakes Improve Preschoolers' Detection on Snakes? A Study of Inattentional Blindness.

This study created a motion graphic (MG) animation about the danger of snakes within a story telling structure, which is different from a traditional science animation that relies on explanatory language to explain the scientific concept. The effects of the two types of animations on children’s attentional perception on snakes were compared by an inattentional blindness (IB) task. Three groups of children undertook the IB task with one control group who did not watch the animation and the other two groups who watched the MG and the traditional styled animation, respectively in advance. The results showed that: (1) Children who watched the animation were significantly more likely to detect the unexpected snake images in the IB task than those who did not watch the animation; (2) Children who watched the MG animation showed a higher detection rate on the snake images than those who watched the traditional animation. The findings indicate that the intervention of animation would increase children’s attentional perception on the key concepts significantly. The MG animation has more impact than the traditional animation on children’s attentional perception on the key information. This study demonstrates that MG animation may have a significant value in promoting science education for young children that merits further explorations in depth.

The effect of emotional valence and age of faces on adults and children's inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness (IB) refers to the nature of an individual being unaware of an unexpected stimulus when focusing on an attentional task. Investigation into IB provides an innovative approach for the research of attentional bias that is connected with an individual's immediate attentional capture. This study explored the effect of emotional valence and age of faces on the IB rates of children and adults. We employed a between-subject experimental design with a 2 (age of participants: child, adult) × 2 (age of face: child face, adult face) × 2 (emotional valence: positive, negative) method and used the classic IB task of cross judgment. The participants included 79 adults (54.63 ± 8.192 years old) and 78 children (10.62 ± 2.32 years old). The results showed that: (1) The IB rates of the two groups differed significantly. Children performed better than adults in detecting the faces appearing unexpectedly. (2) The effect of emotional valence only emerged on adult participants' IB. Adults were significantly more likely to detect the positive-emotional faces than the negative-emotional ones. (3) The age of a face was not a significant factor to predict participants' IB. Neither children nor adults showed a preference for the faces of a specific age (e.g., their own age). These findings revealed the distinct characteristics of attentional capture of children and adults when confronting unexpected facial stimuli.

Pre-stimulus alpha predicts inattentional blindness.

Pre- and post-stimulus oscillatory activity between 8 and 12 hertz, referred to as the alpha-band, correlates with conscious visual awareness of stimuli across a variety of psychophysical tasks. Within an EEG-adapted inattentional blindness task, the current study sought to examine whether this relationship holds for conscious awareness of stimuli under conditions of inattentional blindness. Noticing rates of the task-irrelevant unexpected stimulus were correlated with a significant decrease in alpha power over bilateral parietal-occipital areas during the pre-stimulus interval, and a significant decrease in alpha power over parietal-occipital regions in the right hemisphere during the post-stimulus interval. Findings are taken to imply alpha-band neural activity represents a valid correlate of consciousness that is not confounded by task relevancy or the need for report.

TACS Stimulation at Alpha Frequency Selectively Induces Inattentional Blindness.

Contemporary neurocognitive models implicate alpha oscillations as a top-down mechanism of cortical inhibition, instrumental in the suppression of information that fails to reach conscious visual awareness. This suggests that alpha-band activity may play a key role in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, however this has not yet been empirically examined. The current study employed transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over occipital cortex at alpha, theta, and sham frequencies within an inattentional blindness task to delineate whether an exogenous manipulation of alpha oscillations has a modulatory effect on visual awareness of the unexpected stimulus. Results revealed that compared to theta and sham, those exposed to alpha tACS were more likely to be inattentionally blind to the unexpected stimulus. Findings extend current theoretical views of alpha by suggesting inattentional blindness may be explained as a suppression of irrelevant information via alpha-band.

Now or never: noticing occurs early in sustained inattentional blindness.

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.

What to Where: The Right Attention Set for the Wrong Location.

One of the strongest predictors of whether or not an object in our environment captures our attention is the similarity between that object’s features and those we have prioritized—our attention set. For example, in inattentional blindness tasks, people are more likely to notice an unexpected white shape when tracking white objects than when tracking black objects. These attention sets are assumed to operate globally, enhancing perception of the critical feature across the entire visual field. We tested this assumption in four inattentional blindness experiments. Although observers were more likely to notice a white unexpected object when tracking white shapes, the effect of the participant’s attention set was substantially smaller or absent for objects appearing beyond the attended region. This result challenges the idea that attention sets help guide attention to relevant objects appearing in otherwise unattended regions.

Dollars do not determine detection: Monetary value associated with unexpected objects does not affect the likelihood of inattentional blindness.

Conscious perception often fails when an object appears unexpectedly and our attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). Although various factors have been identified that modulate the likelihood of this failure of awareness, it is not clear whether the monetary reward value associated with an object can affect whether or not this object is detected under conditions of inattention. We hypothesised that unexpectedly appearing objects that contain a feature linked to high value, as established via reward learning in a previous task, would subsequently be detected more frequently than objects containing a feature linked to low value. A total of 537 participants first learned the association between a perceptual feature (colour) and subsequent reward values (high, low, or none reward). Afterwards, participants were randomly assigned to a static (Experiment 1) or dynamic (Experiment 2) inattentional blindness task including an unexpected object associated with high, low, or none reward. However, no significant effect of the previously learned value on the subsequent likelihood of detection was observed. We speculate that artificial monetary value, which is known to affect attentional capture, is not strong enough to determine whether or not an object is consciously perceived.

Semantic associations do not modulate the visual awareness of objects.

When observers adopt a category-level attentional set, objects that belong to the same category as this attentional set are more likely to enter awareness. For example, a driver who is monitoring the road for cars may be more likely to notice an oncoming car than a pedestrian who is crossing the road. Semantic associations between categories are also known to influence the deployment of attention, but it is unclear whether these associative relationships can influence the visual awareness of objects. To address this issue, we conducted four experiments using an inattentional blindness task. Participants tracked moving images of animals (e.g., monkeys or rabbits). On the last trial, an unexpected object that could belong to the same category as the tracked objects (i.e., a monkey or rabbit) or a semantically associated category (i.e., a banana or carrot) moved across the display. Participants were more likely to notice this object when it was visually salient or belonged to the same category as the tracked objects. However, they were no more likely to notice objects that shared a semantic association with the tracked objects. Thus, although categorical relationships play an important role in the visual awareness of objects, this effect does not extend to associative relationships among objects.

Expert drivers are better than non-expert drivers at rejecting unimportant information in static driving scenes

Safe driving is predicated on a driver’s ability to prioritise scene information to segregate hazards and potential hazards from other information, and allocate attention accordingly. Previous research has demonstrated that expert drivers are superior at detecting potential hazards when compared with non-expert drivers. However, hazard perception is a multi-faceted skill involving at least three components: drivers must look at the hazard, then detect it, and finally appraise it and respond appropriately. In the current study, we explored how expert drivers (paramedics, n = 151) and non-expert drivers (n = 189) detect hazards of different threat value. To explore this question, we used a static, driving-related inattentional blindness (IB) task, in which an unexpected object in a critical trial varied from high threat (child running onto the road) to medium threat (pedestrian standing by the road) to low threat (garbage bin next to the road). We hypothesised that experts would have heightened awareness of hazards, which could be reflected as either generally higher rates of noticing objects in the driving scene (lower IB overall), or a heightened ability to prioritise the threat value of objects in the scene (lower IB for high threat, but not low threat objects). The results demonstrated that approx. 90% of drivers, irrespective of expertise, detected high threat objects placed on the side of the road. However, experts were more likely than non-experts to detect medium threat objects (55% of expert drivers vs. 40% of non-expert drivers), whereas the opposite pattern occurred for low threat objects (almost 20% of non-expert drivers noticed low-threat objects, compared with none of the expert drivers). We argue that expertise allows drivers to calibrate a hierarchy of attentional filtering to not only direct attentional resources to locations of interest, but also to explicitly prioritise objects of interest when driving. Importantly, this appears to be due to training rather than years of experience. These results point to the importance of not just increasing awareness while driving, but to develop discriminative capacity to filter out what is unimportant to facilitate safe driving.

The role of similarity in inattentional blindness: Selective enhancement, selective suppression, or both?

ABSTRACTWhen people selectively pay attention to one set of objects and ignore another, unexpected stimuli often go unnoticed. Noticing rates are higher when the unexpected object matches the features of the attended items and lower when it matches those of the ignored items. No prior studies have fully disentangled these aspects of similarity; in previous work, the unexpected object fell on a continuum between the attended and ignored objects, so increasing the similarity to one set of objects necessarily decreased it to the other. We designed an inattentional blindness task in which we held similarity to the attended set constant and varied it with respect only to the ignored set, or vice versa. In Experiment 1, objects that were more similar to the attended set were noticed more often and objects that were more similar to the ignored set were noticed less often. Experiment 2, using a different set of unexpected objects, replicated the result that similarity to the ignored set affected noticing, but showed no effect of similarity to the attended set. In both experiments, the pattern of noticing rates differed for similarity with respect to the attended and ignored items, suggesting that suppression of ignored objects functions independently of enhancement of attended objects.

Allocating Attention to Detect Motorcycles: The Role of Inattentional Blindness.

To determine whether inattentional blindness (IB) can be used to understand the psychological mechanisms around looked-but-failed-to-see (LBFTS) crashes involving motorcycles Background: IB occurs when an observer looks directly at an object yet fails to see it, thus LBFTS crashes may be a real-world example of IB. The study tests a perceptual cycle model in which motorcycles are detected less frequently because they fall lower on the attentional hierarchy for driving. A driving-related IB task with photographs of driving situations investigated whether an additional stimulus, a taxi or motorcycle, would be more likely to be missed by participants. In Experiments 2 and 3, the "threat value" of objects in the scene were varied to determine the degree to which this influences participants' tendency to notice motorcycles. Participants were twice as likely to miss a motorcycle compared with a taxi. Moreover, participants reported that they would expect to miss a motorcycle on the road. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants modulated their attention to accommodate motorcycles when necessary, suggesting that motorcycles are afforded the lowest level of attentional bandwidth. Inattentional blindness forms a good psychological framework for understanding LBFTS crashes, particularly in the context of attentional set, such that LBFTS crashes occur because motorcycles do not feature strongly in a typical driver's attentional set for driving. The findings here are important because LBFTS crashes can be reduced if we can change the expectations of road users around the presence of motorcycles on the road.

Clarifying the role of target similarity, task relevance and feature-based suppression during sustained inattentional blindness.

How is feature-based attention distributed when engaged in a challenging attentional task? Thanks to formative electrophysiological and psychophysical work, we know a great deal about the spatial distribution of attention, but much less is known about how feature-based attention is allocated. In a large-scale online study, we investigated the distribution of attention to color space using a sustained inattentional blindness task. In order to query what parts of color space were being attended or inhibited, we varied the color of an unexpected stimulus on the final trial. Noticing rates for this stimulus indicate that when engaged in a difficult task that involves tracking items of one color and ignoring items of two different colors, observers attend the target color and inhibit the to-be ignored colors. Further, similarity to the target drives detection such that colors more similar to the target are more likely to be detected. Finally, our data suggest that when possible, observers inhibit regions of color space rather than individuating specific colors and adjusting the level of inhibition for a particular color accordingly. Together, our data support the notion of feature-based suppression for task relevant (to-be ignored) information, but we found no evidence of an inhibitory surround based on target color similarity.