Watching Without Seeing: Determinants and Mechanisms of Inattentional Blindnes

Watching Without Seeing: Determinants and Mechanisms of Inattentional Blindness / Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst: Determinanten und Mechanismen von Inattentional Blindness. Carina Kreitz. Zeitschrift für Sportpsychologie (2017), 24, pp. 120-127. https://doi.org/10.1026/1612-5010/a000203

Abstract: We sometimes fail to consciously notice stimuli right in front of our eyes if those stimuli occur unexpectedly and our attention is diverted by another task. This phenomenon has been termed inattentional blindness and can have fatal consequences in daily-life situations as well as a severe impact on sports performance. In accordance with previous research, my findings indicate that a multitude of situational factors, including features of the unexpected object and characteristics of the context, influence the probability of inattentional blindness. By contrast, individual differences in personality and cognition do not seem to further differentiate the probability of inattentional blindness beyond situational aspects (or at least not reliably or substantially). That is, while there is a fixed probability for all observers to notice an unexpected object in a specific situation (deterministic aspect of inattentional blindness), we cannot predict who exactly will belong to the group of noticers (stochastic aspect).

Keywords: attention, inattentional blindness, failures of awareness