Inattentional Blindness

7 Key excerpts on "Inattentional Blindness"

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  Attention

  • Wayne Wu(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor and Francis

    (Publisher)

  The attentional blink can be demonstrated in normal subjects and is characterized by the inability to notice a second stimulus rapidly presented after an initial stimulus, as if after attending to the first, attention then blinks and misses subsequent stimuli within a small temporal window (Martens and Wyble 2010; Dux and Marois 2009). In both cases, it is postulated that the inability to attend to a stimulus implies that the subject is not conscious of the stimulus. 5 We do not have the space to discuss these interesting phenomena, but the criticisms I shall later make of Inattentional Blindness experiments can be applied to these cases as well. This empirical work suggested to many cognitive scientists that the absence of attention to an object is sufficient for the absence of consciousness of that object. In the visual domain, inattention suffices for blindness, i.e., Inattentional Blindness. Perhaps this seems to you to be the right conclusion, but there are two major questions that must be answered before one can understand what the claim is: What is meant by “blindness,” and what conception of attention is in play? 5.5 On blindness What is meant by “blindness” in Hypothesis (GK) ? It can’t just mean the mundane idea of a failure to notice, as when one yells, “Are you blind ?”, at a friend who fails to notice something visually obvious. The Inattentional Blindness paradigms demonstrate blindness in that sense, but such blindness is compatible with actually visually experiencing what one has failed to notice. That is why we think our friend is subject to criticism for his inattention. Such blindness is unfortunately all too common. Accordingly, for the thesis of Inattentional Blindness to be interesting in respect of phenomenal consciousness, “blindness” must be taken literally. But what does this come to? Surprisingly, there is almost no discussion of this in a literature that constantly speaks about blindness

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  The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness

  • Susan Schneider, Max Velmans, Susan Schneider, Max Velmans(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  A snapshot of the study in which participants failed to notice a man in a gorilla suit when attending closely to the people wearing white shirts. Simons, D.J. and Chabris, C.F. (1999). Reproduced with the permission of Sage Publications.

  In addition to demonstrating the important role that attention plays in allowing stimuli to be consciously perceived, the study of Inattentional Blindness is also important because it reveals the potential of fatal consequences outside of the lab. Perhaps most commonly, Inattentional Blindness is thought to cause many automobile accidents every day because drivers are paying more attention to other items (e.g., their cell phones, the radio, etc.) than they are to the road (Horrey & Wickens 2006). In addition, Inattentional Blindness may also impair medical screenings. In one study, trained radiologists looking at familiar medical images failed to notice a small picture of a gorilla placed within patients’ lungs (Drew, Võ, & Wolfe 2013). While it is unlikely that a radiologist will ever find a gorilla picture in one of their scans, it is imminently possible that they will fail to miss a target mass (e.g., a tumor) if they are distracted by something else (e.g., a conversation or music in the room). Thus, Inattentional Blindness is not a phenomenon that is strictly confined to the laboratory; indeed, it is likely that we all commonly experience Inattentional Blindness in our daily lives, but simply fail to realize it.

  While Inattentional Blindness is a powerful way to prevent stimuli from reaching conscious awareness and yields some of the most interesting results in consciousness studies, it can be a difficult experimental paradigm with which to work. In the majority of cases, after participants have been alerted to the conditions of inattention, they will no longer be susceptible to the same types of Inattentional Blindness. For example, once alerted to having missed the man in a gorilla suit that walked across the display, participants will subsequently perceive that man in future trials (though they may still fail to notice other novel aspects of the scene, such as a background item changing color (Simons 2010)). Thus, in most situations, experimenters only get one critical trial per subject. For this reason, researchers have relied heavily on other psychophysical techniques that render stimuli invisible to consciousness. Below we discuss two such paradigms: change blindness and the attentional blink.

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  Judgment in Managerial Decision Making

  • Max H. Bazerman, Don A. Moore(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  We believe that research on Inattentional Blindness provides ample evidence against the use of cell phones while driving. Recent work connects Inattentional Blindness to neural regions in the brain (C. M. Moore & Egeth, 1997) and identifies many key independent variables that affect the probability of not seeing the obvious (Mack, 2003). Beyond our own fascination with this basic research, we are interested in making an analogy from this work in the visual realm to the Inattentional Blindness that leads most decision makers to overlook a broad array of information that is readily available in the environment. For instance, we are struck by the many times our spouses have claimed to have told us something of which we have absolutely no recollection. Like many people would, we tend to conclude that our spouses must have imagined the interaction. But if we could miss seeing the woman with the umbrella in Neisser’s video, we must accept the possibility that our spouses did indeed provide the information that they claimed and that our minds were focused elsewhere. CHANGE BLINDNESS Researchers have provided evidence that, in a surprisingly large number of cases, people fail to notice obvious visual changes in their physical environments (Simons, 2000). For example, Simons, Chabris, Schnur, and Levin (2002) had an experimenter who was holding a basketball stop a pedestrian and ask for directions. While the pedestrian was giving directions, a group of people walked between the experimenter and the pedestrian, and one member of the group surreptitiously took the basketball from the experimenter. After the pedestrian finished providing directions, he or she was asked if he or she noticed anything unexpected or noticed a change. Most of the pedestrians did not report noticing the removal of the basketball.

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  Essential Psychology

  • Philip Banyard, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon, Belinda Winder, Philip Banyard, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon, Belinda Winder(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  However, when features need to be combined, participants need to selectively attend to each of the objects in the search array. So, on the left, the attribute ‘blue’ pops out in a background of pink shapes, making the search very quick. However, on the right we need to bind together the attributes ‘blue’ and ‘diamond’, requiring an attentive visual search of all of the possibilities. 6.6 ARE WE AWARE OF EVERYTHING? It feels to us that we are aware of everything around us, and yet object-based attention illustrates that under normal operating conditions we do not in fact attend to everything we thought we were attending to. Our brain has incredibly powerful processing capacity, but it is a finite resource and failures of attention are a commonplace occurrence (change blind- ness and Inattentional Blindness). However, damage to our brain can also lead to failures of attention (visual neglect/hemispatial inattention). 6.6.1 Change blindness, Inattentional Blindness and visual neglect Change blindness (CB) refers to when people fail to perceive (big or small) changes in the very thing they are attending to. A simple (static) illustration of this can be found in traditional ‘spot the difference’ games. However, CB also occurs in dynamic scenes (e.g. change in object colour, or features being added or taken away) as they are being attended to. Take a look at the Key Study for a remarkable illustration of change blindness. 142 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY In Inattentional Blindness (IB) observers miss changes or events in the visual scene while they are attending to something else. These changes may be quite small (e.g. a briefly presented shape or word) but they can also be quite dramatic. For example, Simons and Chabris (1999) showed naive participants a video event in which two teams were playing a game of basketball. The viewers were asked to concentrate on just one of the teams and to count the number of passes they made.

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  Psychology in the Brain

  Integrative Cognitive Neuroscience

  • Leon Kenemans, Nick Ramsey(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Source : From Zorzi et al. (2002). Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature. Perception and Attention 47 attention to certain aspects of that scene or event, whereas the stimulus input itself is com-pletely invariant. Inattentional Blindness is somewhat reminiscent of the classic ‘cocktail party’ phenom-enon. In spite of the surrounding noise we manage to listen selectively to one speaker. Apparently, some quality enables us to select one stream of utterances among many others. In the laboratory this situation has been mimicked in what are called shadowing or dichotic listening tasks (Cherry, 1953). Two streams of information (prose passages, word lists) are presented to the subject, one to each ear. The subject has to straight away repeat the words presented to one ear, while the information presented to the other ear has to be ignored. In another version of the task, the two information streams differ in an additional respect, such as one message being conveyed by a male voice, the other by a female voice. The task is to repeat all the words conveyed by one voice, even when the voice switches from one ear to the other. The task has now become more difficult: subjects take longer to repeat the words and they make more errors. Apparently directing attention is easier for some cues (e.g. ear or location), than others (e.g. voice type). In the split memory span task (Broadbent, 1958), the subject is presented with three consecutive pairs of digits to the two ears, (e.g. 3 left, 5 right; 7 left, 2 right; 4 left, 9 right). When asked to repeat the 6 digits, the subject will say 374 529, or 529 374. Thus, the subject first recalls the 3 numbers presented to one ear, and sub-sequently those presented to the other. If asked to follow a different strategy, such as repeat in the order of presentation, their performance deteriorates. It is as if after presentation the 6 digits reside in some memory buffer.

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  Driver Distraction and Inattention

  Advances in Research and Countermeasures, Volume 1

  • John D. Lee, Michael A. Regan(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Inattentional Blindness . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Miller, E.K. and Cohen, J.D. 2001. An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Reviews of Neuroscience , 24: 167-202.

  Milner, A.D. and Goodale, M.A. 1995. The Visual Brain in Action . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Navon, D. and Gopher, D. 1979. On the economy of the human processing system. Psychological Review , 86: 214-55.

  Neisser U. 1976. Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology . San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

  Norman, D.A. 1981. Categorization of action slips. Psychological Review , 88(1): 1-15.

  Norman, D. and Shallice, T. 1986. Attention to action: Willed and automatic control of behavior. In Consciousness and Self Regulation , Vol. 4, R. Davidson, G. Schwartz and D. Shapiro (eds). New York: Plenum.

  Olson, R.L., Hanowski, R.J., Hickman, J.S. and Bocanegra J. 2009. Driver distraction in commercial vehicle operations . Department of Transportation, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Report No. FMCSA-RRR-09-042.

  Pashler, H. and Johnston, J.C. 1998. Attentional limitations in dual-task performance. In Attention , H. Pashler (ed.). Hove: Psychology Press: 155-189.

  Pezzulo, G. 2007. Schemas and schema-based architectures . Technical Report. Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” of the National Research Council of Italy. Available at http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=1 , downloaded 9 April 2011.

  Pfeifer, R. and Scheier, C. 2000. Understanding Intelligence . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Piaget, J. 1971. Biology and Knowledge . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Posner, M. I. 1980. Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , 32: 3-25.

  Potter, M.C. 1975. Meaning in visual search. Science , 187: 965-66.

  Räsänen, M. and Summala, H. 1998. Attention and expectation problems in bicycle-car collisions: An in-depth study. Accident Analysis and Prevention , 30: 657-66.

  Rasmussen, J. 1990. Human error and the problem of causality in analysis of accidents. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society of London, B

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  Seeing

  • Karen K. De Valois(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Wolfe V. VISION WITHOUT ATTENTION A. The Problem Finally, we should say something about the fate of visual stimuli that are never attended. As a general rule, studies of the e ff ects of inattention try to force subjects 8 Visual Attention 367 FIGURE 12 Change blindness: What is the di ff erence between the two images? to attend to one stimulus while other stimuli are presented. The subject is then queried, implicitly or explicitly, about the unattended stimulus. Experiments of this sort yield a very wide range of opinions about the fate of the unattended. At one extreme, Mack and her colleagues have argued for “Inattentional Blindness” (Mack & Rock, 1998; Mack,Tang,Tuma, & Kahn, 1992). At the other extreme are claims for semantic processing of unattended words (Hawley et al., 1994; Johnston et al., 1993). These debates about unattended stimuli are the latest version of the late ver-sus early selection debates in the attention literature (well reviewed by Pashler, 1997). Models that hold that preattentive processing stops with the processing of basic features can be labeled as “early selection models.”Models that hold that stim-uli are much more thoroughly processed preattentively are late selection models. In early selection models, attention is needed to complete the act of perception. In late selection models, attention selects responses to fully processed stimuli. B. How Unattended Can You Get? Can any sense be made out of the divergent studies of the perception of unattended stimuli? Although the topic remains controversial, some headway can be made. First, we should consider what it means for a stimulus to be unattended. In a series of experiments, Braun and his colleagues had subjects perform a demanding visual search task at fi xation and, at the same time, assessed their ability to perform other search tasks in the periphery.

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