Attentional development can help us understand the inattentional blindness effect in visual search

Abstract

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.