IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0134675.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Inattentional Blindness and Individual Differences in Cognitive Abilities

Author

Listed:
  • Carina Kreitz
  • Philip Furley
  • Daniel Memmert
  • Daniel J Simons

Abstract

People sometimes fail to notice salient unexpected objects when their attention is otherwise occupied, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. To explore individual differences in inattentional blindness, we employed both static and dynamic tasks that either presented the unexpected object away from the focus of attention (spatial) or near the focus of attention (central). We hypothesized that noticing in central tasks might be driven by the availability of cognitive resources like working memory, and that noticing in spatial tasks might be driven by the limits on spatial attention like attention breadth. However, none of the cognitive measures predicted noticing in the dynamic central task or in either the static or dynamic spatial task. Only in the central static task did working memory capacity predict noticing, and that relationship was fairly weak. Furthermore, whether or not participants noticed an unexpected object in a static task was only weakly associated with their odds of noticing an unexpected object in a dynamic task. Taken together, our results are largely consistent with the notion that noticing unexpected objects is driven more by stochastic processes common to all people than by stable individual differences in cognitive abilities.

Suggested Citation

  • Carina Kreitz & Philip Furley & Daniel Memmert & Daniel J Simons, 2015. "Inattentional Blindness and Individual Differences in Cognitive Abilities," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(8), pages 1-27, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0134675
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134675
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134675
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134675&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0134675?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stefanie Hüttermann & Daniel Memmert & Daniel J Simons & Otmar Bock, 2013. "Fixation Strategy Influences the Ability to Focus Attention on Two Spatially Separate Objects," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(6), pages 1-8, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stefanie Hüttermann & Benjamin Noël & Daniel Memmert, 2017. "Evaluating erroneous offside calls in soccer," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(3), pages 1-11, March.
    2. Eleftheria Giannouli & Otmar Bock & Wiebren Zijlstra, 2018. "Cognitive functioning is more closely related to real-life mobility than to laboratory-based mobility parameters," European Journal of Ageing, Springer, vol. 15(1), pages 57-65, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0134675. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.