Perceiving Things Or Inattentional Blindness

This article describes that our mind does not necessarily perceive things, unless our mind is directed solely to it. This is called Inattentional Blindness (IB), and what that is, is the failure to see highly visible objects we may be looking at directly when our attention is elsewhere. This raises questions, for example, Is IB an instance of rapid of forgetting, or is it a failure to perceive? A few studies were done to analyze IB, including, Haines (1991). Research on pilots.

Within this experiment Haines, had experienced pilots who were familiar to flight simulators, and proceeded to have them land a plane when there was a second airplane blatantly in the way. Surprisingly, none of the pilots noticed the plane until it was too late. Even more alarming, this is not uncommon, but this study does help explain why car accidents are frequent, because the driver is distracted. Likewise, another study was done a few years prior, Neisser (1979). Research done on a woman holding an umbrella. This experiment consisted of two groups of players on a basketball court. Half of the players had black uniforms, and the other half wore white uniforms.

The participants were asked to count how many times the ball was passed around, and during this a woman with an umbrella walked into the middle of the court and walked right back out. Oddly enough, only 21% reported the presence of the woman. Later, this studied was continued by Simon & Chabris (1999), instead of the woman they switched it up, and had a man wearing a gorilla costume who abruptly stopped in the middle of the court to thump his chest. This experiment further suggested that we do not generally perceive something that is there when we are focused on something else.

All of these experiments sparked a confusion whether or not IB was the same as inattentional amnesia. Inattentional amnesia is the failure in creating explicit memory. By the time a subject is asked to recall seeing an item, their memory for the stimulus has vanished. In addition, this controversy did not have evidence to support IB, and Inattentional amnesia being the same. Since priming can only occur when there is some memory of the stimulus, even if that memory is inaccessible, which makes IB significantly different from Inattentional amnesia.

Furthermore, Implicit cognition refers to unconscious influences such as knowledge, perception, or memory, that influence a person's behavior, even though they themselves have no conscious awareness whatsoever of those influences. If the stimuli are not seen because of IB are actually processed but encoded outside of awareness, and this establishes that they prime subsequent behavior. The typical method for documenting implicit perception involve measuring reaction time over multiple trials, to gain data. Also, stem completion, can be used when the critical stimuli are words. IB experiments using this specific method have illustrated remarkable priming (Mack & Rock, 1998), as well as more evidence over visual information experience considerable processing forgoing the attention span.

In a different study Moore & Egeth (1997), made the breakthrough of the Muller-Lyle illusion, which is when two lines are perceived unequal, but they are actually the same length. This is because one line has outgoing fins, which to the eye makes it come across as longer, and the other line has ingoing fins, which to the naked eye makes it look significantly shorter. Thus, critical stimulus in the IB pattern can prime subsequent responses is evidence that this stimulus can perceive and encode. In addition, attention is captured only after the meaning of a stimulus has been analyzed. Some psychologists even believe that attention operates a lot sooner in encoding sensory input, before the meaning has time to be analyzed. On the assumption that perceptual load effects what stimuli are encoded. When the perceptual load is overloaded only attended stimuli are coded. Whereas, when the perceptual load is lo, unattended stimuli are also processed. This concept is not clear, since we cannot estimate the perceptual load.

At a different approach, researchers have used magnetic imaging techniques. These machines make it possible for us to determine what happens in the brain when observers fail to detect a visual stimulus. Neural recording techniques may be able to show whether visual stimuli are unconsciously perceived in the same areas of the brain to the same extent as visual stimuli that are seen. In a study with Scholte, Spekreijse, and Lamme (2001), they have discovered similar activity to the segmentation of unattended stimuli from their backgrounds. For example, the grouping of the unattended stimuli, so they stood out from the background on which they appeared. The activation was found regardless of whether the stimuli were attended and seen or unattended and not seen. In a different study, Rees et al. (1999), they used, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To get pictures of the brain while active in a perceptual task, but they found no evidence in the difference of the neural processing of meaningful, and meaningless stimuli which created a conflict of interest. The results of the study provided, that unattended stimuli are not processed for meaning.

On another note, there is a neurological disorder that mimics the effects of IB. When people experience brain injuries that causes lesions in the parietal cortex, which is the area of the brain that is associated with attention. They often reveal that they fail to see objects located in the visual field opposite the site of lesion, and this is called unilateral visual neglect. IB highlights the special link between perception and, attention. Which is further exhibited by recent evidence illustrating that unattended stimuli share features with task-relevant stimuli. This newly found evidence shows the power of our intentions in figuring out what we see and what we do not see.

In conclusion, Inattentional blindness (IB) is the psychological lack of attention that is not associated with any vision defects or deficits. It may be further defined as the event in which an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight. we are still left in curiosity with IB, since we are unsure of whether or not all unattended, unseen, stimuli in a complex scene are fully processed outside our awareness.