Some See It, Some Don’t: Exploring the Relation between Inattentional Blindness and Personality Factors

Abstract

Human awareness is highly limited, which is vividly demonstrated by the phenomenon that unexpected objects go unnoticed when attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). Typically, some people fail to notice unexpected objects while others detect them instantaneously. Whether this pattern reflects stable individual differences is unclear to date. In particular, hardly anything is known about the influence of personality on the likelihood of inattentional blindness. To fill this empirical gap, we examined the role of multiple personality factors, namely the Big Five, BIS/BAS, absorption, achievement motivation, and schizotypy, in these failures of awareness. In a large-scale sample (N = 554), susceptibility to inattentional blindness was associated with a low level of openness to experience and marginally with a low level of achievement motivation. However, in a multiple regression analysis, only openness emerged as an independent, negative predictor. This suggests that the general tendency to be open to experience extends to the domain of perception. Our results complement earlier work on the possible link between inattentional blindness and personality by demonstrating, for the first time, that failures to consciously perceive unexpected objects reflect individual differences on a fundamental dimension of personality.

Attention capture, processing speed, and inattentional blindness

“…Those individuals who rated themselves higher in conscientiousness were significantly less likely to notice the unexpected event, and while the relationship was no longer significant after controlling for individual differences in processing speed, the same trend between conscientiousness and IB persisted. This relationship between conscientiousness and IB is in contrast to our own work that used a similar sustained IB task (Wright, Boot, & Morgan, 2013) and other work that used a static IB task (Kreitz, Schuerch, Gibbons, & Memmert, 2015). Kreitz and colleagues (2015) suggest that demands of the primary task may account for differences in findings across studies.…”

Winter birth, urbanicity and immigrant status predict psychometric schizotypy dimensions in adolescents

“…This is consistent with previously shown strong associations between neuroticism and positive schizotypy [46][47][48][49][50][51], suggestive of aetiological underpinnings [52][53][54][55] with shared genetic etiology [56] and not solely a 'secondary effect' of schizophrenia-spectrum psychopathology. High openness to experience has also been repeatedly associated with positive schizotypy [51,57,58] and its influence extends to the domain of perception [59]. It is interesting that, consistent with the latter, we confirmed this relationship for the ''unusual experiences'' and ''magical thinking'' schizotypy dimensions.…”

Sustained Inattentional Blindness Does Not Always Decrease With Age

“…Researchers expected to find some predictors of IB, but most of them have not found positive results. Kreitz et al (2015b) investigated the relevance of IB and personality traits. They found that openness was a predictor of IB.…”