Attentional development can help us understand the inattentional blindness effect in visual search
Introduction: Inattentional Blindness (IB) is the failure to notice an unexpected, usually salient stimulus while immersed in a different, often demanding attentional task. More than just a laboratory curiosity, IB is an important phenomenon to understand because it may be related to real-world erro...
| Autores: | , , , , |
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid |
| Repositorio: | Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/709962 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10486/709962 https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2023.1134505 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | inattentional blindness visual search development attention individual differences intelligence quotient gender Psicología |
| Resumo: | Introduction: Inattentional Blindness (IB) is the failure to notice an unexpected, usually salient stimulus while immersed in a different, often demanding attentional task. More than just a laboratory curiosity, IB is an important phenomenon to understand because it may be related to real-world errors such as missed “incidental findings” in medical image or security searches. Interest in individual differences in susceptibility to IB has produced a number of studies showing inconclusive results. Methods: Here, we tested IB in a sample of 277 participants, 4-25 years old performing a visual search task. On two critical trials, an unexpected letter and an unexpected word were presented among photorealistic objects. Results: There was a clear age effect with younger individuals showing higher IB levels. IB correlated with attentional control in visual search and with Continuous Performance Test-CPT for d-prime, response times and attentional shifting measures. These effects disappeared if age was controlled. There were no general effects of intelligence (IQ; RIST) or gender. Younger observers showed a negative correlation of IB for the word with the verbal components of the RIST IQ-proxy (no effect for the letter). Discussion: These results support a relationship between IB and cognitive-developmental changes, showing that maturation of attention and executive processes can help us understand the intriguing phenomenon of (sometimes) missing what is in front of our eyes |
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