The role of similarity in inattentional blindness: Selective enhancement, selective suppression, or both?

Wood, Katherine; Simons, Daniel J.

doi:10.1080/13506285.2017.1365791

Cited by 10 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, a consensus definition of attention has proven notoriously difficult to obtain, an issue that has undoubtedly complicated a clear understanding of IB. Among other definitions, some describe attention based on functional properties of enhancement or inhibition (Wood & Simons, 2017b); others through endogenous or exogenous mechanisms (van Boxtel et al, 2010), or via object-, feature-, or spatial-components (Koivisto et al, 2009). Perhaps the most common definition views attention as a goal-directed mechanism of selection (Nakayama & Martini, 2011).…”

Section: Defining Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, when the degree of similarity between the critical stimulus and target is held constant, and only the relationship between the critical stimulus and distractor items is manipulated, findings suggest that the attention set effect is, at least in part, due to inhibition. An example comes from work by Wood and Simons (2017b). Participants were presented a subset of items that contained color information of both target items and the critical stimulus (checkerboards, see Figure 1).…”

Section: Theoretical Moderatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is consequently reason to suspect that effects observed for the relationship between attention set and IB are, at least in part, a result of selective inhibition (Goldstein & Beck, 2016; Koivisto & Revonsuo, 2008; Most et al, 2001; Wood & Simons, 2017b). While this does not preclude the validity of the attention set account, it complicates the interpretation that IB is an “absence” of attention, precisely because some degree of top-down selection must be instantiated for inhibition to occur (Couperus & Lydic, 2019).…”

Section: Theoretical Moderatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

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

Hutchinson¹,

Pammer²,

Bandara³

et al. 2022

Psychological Bulletin

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Inattentional blindness (IB), the failure to notice something right in front of you, offers cognitive scientists and practitioners alike a unique means of studying the nature of visual perception. The present meta-analysis sought to provide the first synthesis of the two leading theories of IB—attention set and load theory. We aimed to estimate the magnitude of the effect of each, how they interact, and how task parameters moderate the magnitude of IB summary estimates. We further sought to address several theoretical issues that have persisted within this broad literature. A total of 317 effect sizes from 81 studies that had manipulated attention set or load were synthesized in a multilevel meta-analysis. Results indicated no significant difference between the attention set summary estimate (odds ratio [OR] = 3.26, 95% confidence interval [95% CI] [2.33, 4.57]) and the load summary estimate (OR = 1.75, 95% CI [1.10, 2.79]). Theoretical moderators included a difference between feature attention sets (OR = 5.02, 95% CI [2.95, 8.55]), semantic attention sets (OR = 2.64, 95% CI [1.64, 4.25]), and inherent sets (OR = 1.90, 95% CI [1.35, 2.68]), while perceptual load (OR = 2.55, 95% CI [1.66, 3.92]) and cognitive load (OR = 1.67, 95% CI [1.14, 2.44]) were more comparable. The primary task was found as a key task parameter that moderated summary estimates. The attention set summary estimate was moderated by the number of targets and distractors, whereas the load summary estimate was moderated by the full attention (FA) trial exclusion criterion. Analyses indicated any potential publication bias were overall not likely to impact our conclusions. We discuss the implications of results for a conceptual understanding of IB and how the phenomenon can be more reliably studied in future.

show abstract

Section: Defining Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical Moderatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical Moderatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Hutchinson¹,

Pammer²,

Bandara³

et al. 2022

Psychological Bulletin

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Several replications (e.g., Memmert, 2011) as well as adapted versions of this paradigm were used. Adaptations include different shapes and luminance of targets and/or distractors (Most, Scholl, Clifford, & Simons, 2005), different trial durations (18 seconds, Zhang, Yan, Zhang, Shi, & Zhu, 2017), different unexpected objects (Guo, You, & Li, 2016), different speed of the unexpected object (Kreitz, Furley, & Memmert, 2016), or different instructions (Wood & Simons, 2017).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A systematic overview of methods, their limitations, and their opportunities to investigate inattentional blindness

Redlich

Memmert

Kreitz

2020

Applied Cognitive Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

During the past two decades, the interest in investigating the phenomenon of inattentional blindness strongly increased and resulted in a fraying of paradigms investigating this specific failure of awareness. We reviewed 129 full-text articles containing 219 experiments for their design and methods to create awareness for the growing variety of inattentional blindness paradigms. Also, we promote a deliberate use of future paradigms (proposedly based on their functionality and representativeness) to improve the transferability of research findings to the real world. In general, we argue that paradigms should be well-chosen based on the respective purpose, as the concept of inattentional blindness represents most likely several subtypes with different underlying mechanisms rather than a single phenomenon. Finally, we propose to include expectancy as a continuous variable into the definition of inattentional blindness rather than using it as an exclusion criterion.

show abstract

“…Possibly the strongest evidence in support for the no dissociation view comes from work on inattentional blindness (Devue, Laloyaux, Feyers, Theeuwes & Bredart 2009;Mack & Rock, 1998;Most, 2010;Pitts, Martinez, & Hillyard, 2012;Schelonka, Graulty, Canseco-Gonzalez, & Pitts, 2017;Shafto & Pitts, 2015;Wood & Simons, 2017;Wood, 2019). In their experiments, Mack and Rock (1998) had observers monitor a centrally located cross and asked observers to identify which arm of the cross (vertical or horizontal) was longer (see Figure 1.9A).…”

Section: Inattentional Blindnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Relationship between Visual Attention and Perceptual Awareness

Travis¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Selectively attending to what is important in the environment while ignoring less important information is strongly correlated with what is experienced subjectively. Despite this seemingly obvious relationship between what is attended and what is perceived, there is a long-standing debate regarding whether attention and awareness are functionally related. While some have suggested that the two processes are identical, others have argued that they can be dissociated, either singularly (i.e., one process depends on the other) or doubly (i.e., the two processes can act independently). The overarching aim of my thesis was to investigate the relationship between visual attention and awareness, by combining behavioral methods, electroencephalography (EEG) and computational modeling. The thesis is divided into five chapters. In Chapter 1, I review previous literature related to the debate in relation to the no dissociation, single dissociation, and double dissociation views. In doing so, I highlight that the conclusions made about the way attention and awareness relate depend on the task or physical stimulation differences between conditions. In Chapter 2, I endeavored to replicate a study by van Boxtel, Tsuchiya, and Koch (2010a), who reported a double dissociation between attention and awareness using a perceptual adaptation task in which participants' perceptual awareness and visual attention were manipulated independently. van Boxtel et al. (2010a) found that participants' awareness of an adapting stimulus increased afterimage duration, whereas attending to the adaptor decreased it. Consistent with van Boxtel et al. (2010a), I found that afterimage duration was reliably increased when participants were aware of the adapting stimulus. In contrast to van Boxtel et al., however, I found that attention to the adaptor also increased afterimage duration, suggesting that attention and awareness had the same-rather than opposing-effects on afterimage duration. This failure to replicate suggests caution in using this specific approach to support the argument that attention and awareness are dissociable processes. In Chapter 3, across three experiments, I investigated behavioral and EEG responses to examine whether enhancement of goal-relevant stimuli and suppression of goal-irrelevant stimuli arise even when stimuli are masked from awareness. I used a feature-based spatial cueing paradigm in which participants searched four-item arrays for a target in a specific color. Immediately before the target array, a non-predictive cue display was presented in which a cue matched or mismatched the searched-for target color, and appeared either at the target location (valid) or another location (invalid). Cue displays were masked using continuous flash suppression, so that participants were unaware of them on roughly half the trials. The EEG data revealed that target-colored cues produced robust signatures of spatial orienting and distractor-colored cues produced a signature of suppression. Critically, these signatures occurred for bot...

show abstract

The role of similarity in inattentional blindness: Selective enhancement, selective suppression, or both?

Cited by 10 publications

References 12 publications

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

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

A systematic overview of methods, their limitations, and their opportunities to investigate inattentional blindness

On the Relationship between Visual Attention and Perceptual Awareness

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About