Inattentional blindness
[3] A famous study that demonstrated inattentional blindness asked participants whether or not they noticed a person in a gorilla costume walking through the scene of a visual task they had been given.
It is critical to acknowledge that occurrences of inattentional blindness are attributed to the failure to consciously attend to an item in the visual field as opposed the absence of cognitive processing.
More specifically, there is disagreement in the literature about exactly how much processing of a visual scene is completed before selection dictates which stimuli will be consciously perceived, and which will not be (i.e. inattentional blindness).
On the other hand, proponents of late selection theories argue that perception is an unlimited operation, and all stimuli in a visual scene are processed simultaneously.
[22] A notable study by Mack and Rock has also revealed that showing a word stimulus differing from the participant's name by one letter did not generally call conscious attention.
For example, in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by Rees and colleagues, brain activity was recorded while participants completed a perceptual task.
Here, participants were asked to complete a memory task involving either the simple maintenance of verbal stimuli, or the rearrangement of this material, a more cognitively demanding exercise.
[23] Proponents of this theory often state that classic methods for testing inattentional blindness are not manipulating attention per se, but instead the expectation for the presentation of a visual item.
[31] Studies investigating the effect of expectation on episodes of inattentional blindness have shown that once observers are made aware of the importance of the stimuli to be presented, for example stating that one will later be tested on it, the phenomenon essentially disappears.
[2] While admitting to possible ambiguities in methodology, Mack, one of the foremost researchers in the field, holds strongly that inattentional blindness stems predominantly from a failure of attentional capture.
The perceptual cycle framework offers four major implications about inattentional blindness 1) environmental cues aid in the detection of stimuli by providing orienting cues but is not enough to produce awareness, 2) perception requires effortful sustained attention, interpretation, and reinterpretation, 3) implicit memory may precede conscious perception, and 4) visual stimuli that is not expected, explored, or interpreted may not be perceived.
[34][35] The basic Simons and Chabris study was reused on British television as a public safety advert designed to point out the potential dangers to cyclists caused by inattentional blindness in motorists.
[41] These results exemplify a real world occurrence of inattentional blindness, and provide evidence that officer Conley could indeed have missed the fight because his attention was focused elsewhere.
Moreover, these results add to the body of knowledge suggesting that as perceptual load increases, less resources remain to process items not explicitly focused on, and in turn episodes of inattentional blindness become more frequent.
Analyzing the eye movement and fixation data showed no significant difference in time spent looking at the players (black or white) between the two groups.
Mack and Rock note that explanations for inattentional blindness can reflect a basic failure of perceptual processes to be engaged by unattended stimuli.
Research has shown that some aspects of the syndrome of unilateral visual neglect appear to be similar to normal subjects in a state of inattentional blindness.
In neglect, patients with lesions to the parietal cortex fail to respond to and report stimuli presented on the side of space contralateral to damage.
Since such lesions do not result in any sensory deficits, shortcomings have been explained in terms of a lack of attentional processing, for which the parietal cortex plays a large role.
[45] This pattern of results suggests that until the approximate age of 13, presumably because certain aspects of cognition are still under development, inattentional blindness occurrences are more frequent, but become consistent throughout the remainder of the life span.
A large experiment conducted on 794 participants by Schofield, Creswell and Denson[53] found evidence that completing a brief mindfulness exercise reduced rates on inattentional blindness, but did not improve the depth of encoding of the unexpected distractor.
If an item has bright colors, flashing lights, high contrast with environment, or other attention-grabbing physical properties it can attract a person's attention much easier.
They utilized the same Invisible Gorilla video Simons and Chabris did (as mentioned above), but they additionally had participants complete a mathematics test to measure their capacity.
Instead of other factors contributing to the working memory of an individual's noticing, Bredemeier and Simons postulated that external variables establish the appearance of this relationship.
William James addressed the benefits of attention by saying, "Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is utter chaos".
Inattentional blindness is beneficial in the sense that it is a mechanism that has evolved with attention to help filter out irrelevant input, allowing only important information to reach consciousness.
[59] Several researchers, notably James J. Gibson, have argued that, even before the retina, perception begins in the ecology, which has turned perceptual processes into informational relationships in the environment through evolution.
If a person's attention is focused elsewhere while driving, carrying on a conversation or text messaging, for example, they could fail to notice salient and distinctive objects, such as a stop sign, which could lead to serious injury and possibly even death.
Research has shown that the use of both hands-free and hand-held cellular devices while driving results in the failure of attention to explicitly capture other salient and distinctive objects, leading to significantly delayed reaction times, as well as inattentional blindness.
[59] Collaborative efforts to establish links between science and illusion have examined the relationship of the processes underlying inattentional blindness and the concept of misdirection—a magician's ability to manipulate attention in order to prevent his/her audience from seeing how a trick was performed.
