Sustained Inattentional Blindness Does Not Always Decrease With Age

Abstract

Children usually miss additional information when they focus on objects or events. This common phenomenon is termed as inattentional blindness. To explore the age-related degree of this phenomenon, we applied a motion task to study the developmental difference of inattentional blindness. A group of 7-to-14-year-old children and adults participated in Experiment 1. The results showed that there was no significant developmental difference in sustained inattentional blindness. Considering that young children’s performance on the primary task was poor, we hypothesized that the difficulty of the primary task may contribute to the negative findings. Therefore, we decreased the difficulty of the primary task in Experiment 2. Still, the developmental difference in inattentional blindness rates was absent. Overall, current results implied that the ability of a person to detect an unexpected moving stimuli does not always increase with age. The age-related inattentional blindness seems highly dependent on tasks.

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

“…Of course, this cannot be generalized to the load literature more broadly, as it was only evaluated within studies employing a static search array task (e.g., Calvillo & Jackson, 2014). It is an open question whether this finding holds for studies that have used more disparate methods of manipulating load (Zhang et al, 2018). Nevertheless, this subset of studies seems a good starting place for an understanding of the validity of comparing differential load effects across studies.…”

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

“…For instance, the dynamics of the task could be critical given that some tasks, like the "gorilla-task" of Simons and Chabris (1999), involve motion and very distinctive IB stimuli while other tasks are static and use less prominent IB-stimuli (e.g., Buetti et al, 2014). Indeed, some contradictory results have been found, using different dynamic/static tasks (Memmert, 2014;Zhang et al, 2018). Dynamic stimuli do not necessarily generate IB in the same manner as the static stimuli used here, especially in children (for instance, a word can attract more attention than a letter, as we have seen in the results for our older 9+ observers).…”

“…At the other end of the lifespan continuum, using the gorilla paradigm, Memmert (2014) found that younger children were more likely to show IB effects in a large sample of 480 participants from 8 to 15 years-old. However, Zhang et al (2018) failed to find that effect in their sample of 210 observers from 7 to 14 years-old, using a T among L's dynamic IB-task based on Most et al (2001). Zhang et al (2019) also tested 3 to 5 years-old observers in Mack and Rock's (1998) original "cross judging" IB paradigm.…”