Inattentional Blindness and Attention: Exploring the Mechanisms Underlying Failures of Awareness

Inattentional blindness (IB), the failure to notice fully visible unexpected events when attention is otherwise occupied, occurs in a wide variety of contexts and with many different tasks. Despite more than a decade of research on IB, relatively little is known about the mechanisms underlying such failures of awareness. The diverse perceptual failures grouped under this single rubric might reflect the operation of a single attention limit or they could reflect the operation of several distinct attention mechanisms. The methods for inducing IB can be grouped into two distinct classes: failures to notice unexpected events that fall outside the spatial focus of attention and failures to notice unexpected events when central resources are limited. The proposed research will isolate and explore these possible mechanisms for IB by testing the impact of individual difference variables that should be associated with just one of these mechanisms. Understanding how different mechanisms contribute to IB is essential for a complete understanding of this sort of failure of awareness, and it also might help to find ways to limit their practical consequences.