Inattentional Blindness Research Articles

To See or Not to See

People visit public places with different intentions and motivations. While some explore it carefully, others may just want to pass or are otherwise engaged. We investigate how to exploit the inattentional blindness (IB) of indirect users in the design of public interfaces to apply to such diverse needs. Beginning with a structured literature study in the ACM Digital Library on IB, we analyzed 135 publications to derive design strategies that benefit from IB or avoid IB. Using these findings, we selected three existing interfaces for information presentation on a large public square and created two additional interfaces ourselves. We then compared users' perceptions through a self-reported photography study (N = 40). Participants followed one of four scripted profiles to imitate different user intentions, two for direct and two for indirect users. We hypothesized that direct users would recognize the interfaces, while indirect users would experience IB and ignore them. Our results show that direct users reported up to 68% of our interfaces, whereas indirect users noticed only 16%. Thus, IB can be exploited to hide interfaces from indirect users while keeping them noticeable to direct users.

A method for detection of inattentional feature blindness.

In ensemble displays, two principal factors determine the precision with which the mean value of some perceptual attribute, such as size and orientation, can be discriminated: inefficiency and representational noise of each element. Inefficiency is mainlycaused by biased inference, or byinattentional (feature) blindness (i.e.,some elements or their features arenot processed). Here, we define inattentional feature blindness as an inability to perceive the value(s) of certain feature(s) of an object while the presence of the object itself may be registered. Separation of the effects of inattentional (feature) blindness and perceptual noise has escaped traditional analyticmethods because of their trade-off effects on the slope of the psychometric discrimination function. Here, we propose a method that can separate the effects of inattentional feature blindness from that of the representational noise. The basic idea is to display a set of elements from which only one contains information relevant for solving the task, while all other elements are "dummies" carrying no useful information because they do not differ from the reference. If the single informative element goes unprocessed, the correct answer can only be given by a random guess. The guess rate can be modeled similarly to the lapse rate, traditionally represented by λ. As an illustration, we present evidence that the presence versus lack of inattentional feature blindness in orientation pooling depends on the feature typespresent in the display.

Visual Perception: How Better Imaging Can Make Things Worse

Summary Visual search is critical to daily life and to socially important tasks — from cancer screening to airport security. New research shows how a technological advancement can interact with the human visual system to improve search for one type of target while making matters worse for another. Part of the problem is that we are surprisingly bad at knowing where we have looked.

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.

Failure to Perceive Change: From Neurons to Social Networks

Humans are fundamentally bad at perceiving change which is not expected to be present based on prior experience of the organism. Change blindness and inattentional blindness are striking such examples of failure to notice changes in a visual scene. This has been observed in other sensory systems including auditory and somatosensory. In conditions of crisis, whether it is a global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic or a local crisis such as Hurricane Katrina, profound changes in structure and function of previously static environmental elements occur and trickle down to each neighborhood, street corner, and individual person’s life. In such conditions of flux and instability, susceptibility to micro-perceptual failures such as change and inattentional blindness may be heightened. These phenomena occur at millisecond to seconds time scale, at the level of initial sensations and first level perceptions, however are linked to multimodal associative brain-wide processes. Here we review the evidence for, and develop a line of argument that following propositions hold true in conditions of crisis: (1) Frequency of change blindness events and related failures of micro-perceptions may be higher; (2) accumulation of micro-perceptual failures of a single sensory system such as vision can impact complex cognitive processes such as reasoning, reality-based belief, and judgment occurring over longer time scales and brain-wide networks; and (3) same failures of micro-perceptions across individuals in a population may have impact on faulty consensus assessments of reality of situation and missed opportunities for solution building on group or collective level.

The Improvement of Road Driving Safety Guided by Visual Inattentional Blindness

The computational modeling of human visual attention has received much attention in recent decades. In advanced industrial applications, it has been demonstrated that computational visual attention models (CVAMs) can predict visual attention very similarly to human visual attention. However, it is controversial whether the driver’s eye fixation location (EFL) or the predicted eye fixation location of computational visual attention models is more reliable and helpful for actual driving. To address this issue, an open database of videos taken under the most common 18 driving conditions in everyday driving has been established. In experiments using this database, expert drivers found that it was not sufficient for drivers to rely on only one of the two EFLs. Based on this finding, a hybrid EFL recommendation strategy is proposed for improving driving safety. By extracting visual characteristics from human dynamic vision, the performance of the proposed recommendation method demonstrates its potential value in these collected driving tasks. In addition, the visual comfort of driving is further addressed to enhance the safety of driving. From the results of experiments on 108 driving video clips taken of the most common 18 real driving conditions, it is confirmed that the proposed EFL recommendation achieves an experience rating of driving comfort between 88.1 and 92.7 out of 100.

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.

Don't blink: inattentional blindness in radiology report interpretation.

Objectives:Medical errors attributable to inattentional blindness (IAB) may contribute to adverse patient outcomes. IAB has not been studied in the context of reviewing written radiological reports. This cross-sectional, deception-controlled study measures IAB of physicians towards an unexpected stimulus while interpreting written radiological reports.Methods:Physicians and residents from multiple fields were asked to interpret four radiology text reports. Embedded in one was an unexpected stimulus (either an abnormally placed medical exam finding or a non-medical quote from the popular television show Doctor Who). Primary outcomes were differences in detection rates for the two stimuli. Secondary outcomes were differences in detection rates based on level of training and specialty.Results:The unexpected stimulus was detected by 47.8% (n = 43) of participants; the non-medical stimulus was detected more often than the medical stimulus (75.0% vs 21.7%, odds ratio 10.8, 95% confidence interval 4.1–28.7; p < 0.0001). No differences in outcomes were observed between training levels or specialties.Conclusion:Only a minority of physicians successfully detected an unexpected stimulus while interpreting written radiological reports. They were more likely to detect an abnormal non-medical stimulus than a medical stimulus. Findings were independent of the level of training or field of medical practice.Advances in knowledge:This study is the first to show that IAB is indeed present among internal medicine, family medicine, and emergency medicine providers when interpreting written radiology reports.

What Is Inattentional Blindness, What Does It Feel Like? Interview With Daniel Simons, PhD

What Is Inattentional Blindness, What Does It Feel Like? Interview With Daniel Simons, PhD

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.

A Potential Case of Inattentional Blindness in a Police-Pursuit Collision

The perceptual phenomenon of “inattentional blindness” has been widely acknowledged in the scientific literature for 30 years. In addition to the laboratory-based examples, real-life examples appear in the literature. This paper provides a case study where a deputy sheriff’s patrol car collided with a fleeing motorcyclist – with unique circumstances – as recorded on in-car-camera (ICC) videos. Although the motorcyclist brought suit alleging the deputy intentionally collided with him, the deputy reported that he first noticed another deputy running after the motorcyclist prior to seeing the fleeing motorcyclist. However, the ICC video from the involved deputy’s patrol car strongly supports the motorcyclist was visible from the deputy’s perspective before the on-foot deputy appeared. The facts of this incident are compared to the widely accepted characteristics of inattentional blindness in exploring whether that perceptual phenomenon may have been at play in this case.

Clarifying the effect of facial emotional expression on inattentional blindness.

Conscious perception often fails when an object appears unexpectedly and our attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). While various factors have been identified as determinants of inattentional blindness, the influence of an unexpected object́s semantic value remains ambiguous. This is also true for the supposedly evolutionary meaning of faces; some studies found higher detection rates for faces while others did not or used control conditions that differed in physical aspects of the stimulus as well. In the proposed studies we aim to replicate and clarify the effect of the semantic value of faces on inattentional blindness in a controlled and systematic manner.

The invisible breast cancer: Experience does not protect against inattentional blindness to clinically relevant findings in radiology.

Retrospectively obvious events are frequently missed when attention is engaged in another task-a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. Although the task characteristics that predict inattentional blindness rates are relatively well understood, the observer characteristics that predict inattentional blindness rates are largely unknown. Previously, expert radiologists showed a surprising rate of inattentional blindness to a gorilla photoshopped into a CT scan during lung-cancer screening. However, inattentional blindness rates were higher for a group of naïve observers performing the same task, suggesting that perceptual expertise may provide protection against inattentional blindness. Here, we tested whether expertise in radiology predicts inattentional blindness rates for unexpected abnormalities that were clinically relevant. Fifty radiologists evaluated CT scans for lung cancer. The final case contained a large (9.1 cm) breast mass and lymphadenopathy. When their attention was focused on searching for lung nodules, 66% of radiologists did not detect breast cancer and 30% did not detect lymphadenopathy. In contrast, only 3% and 10% of radiologists (N = 30), respectively, missed these abnormalities in a follow-up study when searching for a broader range of abnormalities. Neither experience, primary task performance, nor search behavior predicted which radiologists missed the unexpected abnormalities. These findings suggest perceptual expertise does not protect against inattentional blindness, even for unexpected stimuli that are within the domain of expertise.

Grandma, didn’t you see that gorilla? Age effects in inattentional blindness during a hybrid foraging game

Grandma, didn’t you see that gorilla? Age effects in inattentional blindness during a hybrid foraging game

A systematic overview of methods, their limitations, and their opportunities to investigate inattentional blindness

SummaryDuring the past two decades, the interest in investigating the phenomenon of inattentional blindness strongly increased and resulted in a fraying of paradigms investigating this specific failure of awareness. We reviewed 129 full‐text articles containing 219 experiments for their design and methods to create awareness for the growing variety of inattentional blindness paradigms. Also, we promote a deliberate use of future paradigms (proposedly based on their functionality and representativeness) to improve the transferability of research findings to the real world. In general, we argue that paradigms should be well‐chosen based on the respective purpose, as the concept of inattentional blindness represents most likely several subtypes with different underlying mechanisms rather than a single phenomenon. Finally, we propose to include expectancy as a continuous variable into the definition of inattentional blindness rather than using it as an exclusion criterion.

The predictive global neuronal workspace: A formal active inference model of visual consciousness.

The global neuronal workspace (GNW) model has inspired over two decades of hypothesis-driven research on the neural basis of consciousness. However, recent studies have reported findings that are at odds with empirical predictions of the model. Further, the macro-anatomical focus of current GNW research has limited the specificity of predictions afforded by the model. In this paper we present a neurocomputational model - based on Active Inference - that captures central architectural elements of the GNW and is able to address these limitations. The resulting 'predictive global workspace' casts neuronal dynamics as approximating Bayesian inference, allowing precise, testable predictions at both the behavioural and neural levels of description. We report simulations demonstrating the model's ability to reproduce: 1) the electrophysiological and behavioural results observed in previous studies of inattentional blindness; and 2) the previously introduced four-way taxonomy predicted by the GNW, which describes the relationship between consciousness, attention, and sensory signal strength. We then illustrate how our model can reconcile/explain (apparently) conflicting findings, extend the GNW taxonomy to include the influence of prior expectations, and inspire novel paradigms to test associated behavioural and neural predictions.

Magical Thinking: How Learning to Act Like a Magician Can Make You a Better Physician.

For most of history, the line between magic and medicine was blurred. Before there was a pathophysiologic understanding of disease, there was little distinction between a magician and a physician. Both may wave their hands, utter some Latin-sounding words, produce a potion, and promise to make something (a coin or an ailment) disappear. Still today, providers who have successfully reduced a nursemaid’s elbow or who have made vertigo vanish with a canalith repositioning maneuver have borne witness to the healing power of medical sleight of hand. Recently, the use of magic at the bedside has seen a renaissance of sorts. In a 2017 review, Lam et al1 described many ways providers are incorporating magic in medicine, ranging from teaching patients magic tricks for physical therapy2 to its use as humor therapy as a prophylactic anxiolytic for patients.3,4 As a professional magician and a pediatrician, I have seen how magic and medicine intersect. Whereas I occasionally use a trick to calm an anxious child before an examination, I use the skills of how a magician approaches an audience in every patient encounter. Over the last decade, I have taught over 3000 providers how learning to think and act like a magician, even without doing a magic trick, can improve their ability to connect with patients. In this perspectives article, I will summarize how health care providers can implement 3 skills long used by magicians, those of misdirection, patter, and force, to build rapport and ultimately increase their ability to perform an examination. Nearly the whole art of sleight of hand depends on the art of misdirection. > Harlan Tarbell5 Chabris and Simmons6 demonstrated in their landmark invisible gorilla studies that when participants … Address correspondence to Michael B. Pitt, MD, 2450 Riverside Ave, M653, Minneapolis, MN 55454. E-mail: mbpitt{at}umn.edu

Factors associated with missed and misinterpreted cases of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.

To retrospectively examine US, CT, and MR imaging examinations of missed or misinterpreted pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), and identify factors which may have confounded detection or interpretation. We reviewed 107 examinations in 66/257 patients (26%, mean age 73.7years) diagnosed with PDAC in 2014 and 2015, with missed or misinterpreted imaging findings as determined by a prior study. For each patient, images and reports were independently reviewed by two radiologists, and in consensus, the following factors which may have confounded assessment were recorded: inherent tumor factors, concurrent pancreatic pathology, technical limitations, and cognitive biases. Secondary signs of PDAC associated with each examination were recorded and compared with the original report to determine which findings were missed. There were 66/107 (62%) and 49/107 (46%) cases with missed and misinterpreted imaging findings, respectively. A significant number of missed tumors were < 2cm (45/107, 42%), isoattenuating on CT (32/72, 44%) or non-contour deforming (44/107, 41%). Most (29/49, 59%) misinterpreted examinations were reported as uncomplicated pancreatitis. Almost all examinations (94/107, 88%) demonstrated secondary signs; pancreatic duct dilation was the most common (65/107, 61%) and vascular invasion was the most commonly missed 35/39 (90%). Of the CT and MRIs, 28 of 88 (32%) had suboptimal contrast dosing. Inattentional blindness was the most common cognitive bias, identified in 55/107 (51%) of the exams. Recognizing pitfalls of PDAC detection and interpretation, including intrinsic tumor features, secondary signs, technical factors, and cognitive biases, can assist radiologists in making an early and accurate diagnosis. • There were 66/107 (62%) and 49/107 (46%) cases with missed and misinterpreted imaging findings, respectively, with tumoral, technical, and cognitive factors leading to the misdiagnosis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. • The majority (29/49, 59%) of misinterpreted cases of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma were mistaken for pancreatitis, where an underlying mass or secondary signs were not appreciated due to inflammatory changes. • The most common missed secondary sign of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma was vascular encasement, missed in 35/39 (90%) of cases, indicating the importance of evaluating the peri-pancreatic vasculature.

The contradictions in the existing physics and the psychological factors that influence them to be valued

&lt;p class="1"&gt;Besides the limitation of cognition level, the factors that affect the correctness of academic evaluation are as follows: collusion-recognization effect, backfire effect, cognitive maladjustment, inattentional blindness and aesthetic fatigue. It's hard for readers (especially the reviewers of academic achievements) not to fall into the trap. Therefore, the probability of misjudgment of academic achievements of "questioning and denying current prevailing theories or creating new theories" is very high. The intolerable contradictions in the existing physical theories, such as space paradox, time paradox, quantum entanglement paradox, are exposed by means of thought experiments and "to present the facts, reason things out", and take these works as examples to reveal the formation and utilization of these adverse psychological effects. The conclusions are as follows: both special relativity and Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics have fatal injury; it is difficult to eliminate the misjudgment of academic achievements, but the misjudgment rate can be reduced. The concepts of “invariance of spatial attribution” and “inaction association” are established. These works can urge readers to treat new and old physics theories more carefully, promote the development of physics, and promote the birth and improvement of the evaluation theory of science and technology.&lt;/p&gt;