Selective Attention in Inattentional Blindness: Selection is Specific but Suppression is Not

Abstract

When we selectively attend to one set of objects and ignore another, we often fail to notice unexpected events. The likelihood of noticing varies depending on the similarity of an unexpected object to other items in the display, a process thought to be controlled by the attention set that we create for the attended and ignored objects. It remains unclear, though, how attention sets are formed and structured. Do they enhance features of attended objects ("white") and suppress features of ignored objects ("black"), or do they distinguish objects based on relations or categories ("darker" versus "lighter," or "dark objects" versus "light objects")? In previous work, these explanations are confounded; the objects would be partitioned into the same groups regardless the structure of the attention set. In the present three experiments, the attended or ignored set of objects was a constant color while the other set was variable. When people attended white and ignored a multicolored set of objects (Experiment 1), novel colors were suppressed just as much as display colors, suggesting nonselective filtering of nonwhite objects. When the color of one set of objects varied across displays but was constant within them ( Experiments 2 and 3), we again found as much suppression for task-irrelevant and novel colors as for actively ignored ones. Whenever people ignored a set of objects that varied in color, they suppressed unexpected objects that matched the ignored colors and that differed from the actively ignored items on the critical trial. In contrast, when people attended a varying set, noticing was enhanced only for unexpected objects that matched the currently attended color. In this task, attentional filtering is category-based and did not depend on the features of the individual objects.

What to Where: The Right Attention Set for the Wrong Location

“…That is, observers could effectively suppress a region without regard to the features of objects within that region, minimizing the effects of feature-based sets as we saw for unattended regions in Experiments 3 and 4. This compartmentalization of features in task-irrelevant regions is analogous to the categorization of task-irrelevant features recently observed in Wood and Simons (2017). In both cases, suppression is not feature-based.…”

Nothing else matters: Video games create sustained attentional selection away from task-irrelevant features

“…They conclude that attentional suppression uses different neuronal mechanisms from non-attending as during suppression the attentional set may contain information about the stimuli to be suppressed as well as the stimuli to be attended to (Arita et al, 2012). Most attentional suppression research tends to use a split-second reaction-time paradigm, but attentional suppression has also been studied in an inattentional blindness paradigm (Wood & Simons, 2017). In Experiments 3 and 4 participants were able to direct their attention away from the images without any performance penalty in the game, which may be because their attentional set also suppressed attention to those images.…”

A tale of two theories: A meta-analysis of the attention set and load theories of inattentional blindness.

“…Second, all hypotheses and study design choices should, ideally, be preregistered or use a registered protocol. This includes any directional hypotheses, the rationale for how hypotheses will be tested, and the decision criteria for demarcating a participant as a "noticer" or as "inattentionally blind" (for a good example, see Wood & Simons, 2017a). If this is not possible, authors ought to state their hypotheses up front, transparent to the process by which they were derived, and explicitly highlight if they deviated from their decision in how participants will be coded (and the reason why, if appropriate).…”