What is it about?
This work provides the most comprehensive meta-analytic synthesis to date of experimental research on inattentional blindness, the common experience of missing something right in front of you. The specific focus is on arbitrating between its two leading theories, which sometimes make contradictory predictions as to why (and hence when) inattentional blindness occurs, but also critically and quantitatively examines how it is experimentally studied.
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Why is it important?
Inattentional blindness is probably the most important attention-based phenomenon studied in psychology because it is so commonly experienced in everyday life and can carry serious risks (for example, when driving or in surgery). Our findings demonstrate that an object's relevance (that is, its importance to what you are currently attending) determines its capacity to "break through" inattentional blindness, even when processing load is exceeded (such as when there is simply too much to attend to).
Perspectives
Great effort went into ensuring maximal insight and utility was derived from the more than 80 studies synthesized in this work. I firmly believe it delivers enormous usefulness, not only for psychological research on attention, but in the translation of this research for practitioners.
Brendan Hutchinson
Australian National University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A tale of two theories: A meta-analysis of the attention set and load theories of inattentional blindness., Psychological Bulletin, May 2022, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/bul0000371.
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