Attention I: Inattentional Blindness and Change Blindness

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering key definitions, major psychological studies, and statistical findings regarding inattentional and change blindness.

Inattentional blindness

A phenomenon that occurs when people fail to notice something even though it is in clear view.

Perceptual load

The degree to which a task demands attention
Research by Cartwright-Finch & Lavie ($2007$) indicates tasks with high loads are more likely to yield inattentional blindness.

Gorillas in Our Midst Study

Study by Simons & Chabris (1999) found that 46% of observers failed to report seeing a woman with an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walking through a game.

Lung nodules

Small masses of tissue in the lungs that sometimes prove to be cancerous; they appear as small light circles in axial slices during screenings.

Drew, Võ, & Wolfe ($2013$)

A study showing that even expert radiologists missed a gorilla in a lung-cancer screening stack because their attention was focused on nodules.

Hyman et al. ($2010$)

Research concluding that individuals walking while talking on a cell phone displayed inattentional blindness regarding a unicycling clown in a real-world situation.

Crime blindness

The impact of inattentional blindness on eyewitness awareness, memory, and identification, researched by Wulff & Hyman ($2022$).

Change blindness

When people have difficulty detecting changes in scenes, often because attention is not directed at the location where the change occurs.

Ehinger et al. 2016:

According to which study are changes in the existence or position of an object are more readily detected than changes in surface properties such as color.

Object change vs. Color change detection

In Ehinger et al. ($2016$), object changes were detected at a rate of $64.7\%$ while color changes were detected at $62.3\%$, with a false alarm rate of $3.2\%$,.

Ancestral priorities

A concept from New et al. ($2007$) suggesting humans are better tuned to monitor animals and humans because they were once consequential, time-sensitive categories for hunter-gatherers.

New et al. ($2007$) results

Research found that changes to animals were detected $100\%$ of the time, while changes to a high-contrast red minivan were only detected $72\%$ of the time.