PS251 - Failures of Attention

Failures of attention

• Failures of attention occur when individuals fail to notice or respond to information in their environment, despite it being potentially relevant

• Includes inattentional blindness, where an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus, or divided attention failures, where multitasking impairs performance.

• Studied using controlled experimental designs, measuring accuracy, reaction times, and error rates to understand the mechanisms and limits of attention.

Treisman and Gelade’s (1980) Feature Integration Theory

• Participants performed visual search tasks, identifying target stimuli among distractors. Found that simple features, such as colour or shape, could be detected automatically, but the combination of features required focused attention.

• When attention was diverted, participants frequently failed to detect conjunctions of features, demonstrating a clear failure of selective attention.

• This research utilised controlled laboratory tasks, manipulating attention demands and measuring detection accuracy. Provides strong evidence that attention is a limited-capacity system, and that complex stimuli can be missed when cognitive resources are insufficiently allocated.

Tillman et al. (2017)

• Participants engaged in driving simulations while conversing with a passenger, creating a cognitive load that divided attention between two tasks.

• Measured RT and error rates. Participants were slower to respond to hazards and more likely to miss critical driving events under high cognitive load.

• Demonstrates how divided attention can lead to significant failures, with implications for real-world tasks such as driving while distracted. The study illustrates the application of cognitive psychology research to everyday problems, using experimental manipulation of cognitive load to reveal the limits of attentional resources.

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