Inattentional Blindness is a person’s “blindness” of an unexpected but visible stimulus while concentrating on another task. The inattentional blindness paradigm is ideal for the research of creative processes in various activities, since attention performances are associated with the discovery of unexpected objects. IB, usually harmless, can be hazardous in threatening conditions. Threat detection is the ability to efficiently detect the presence of stimuli that might undermine physical or psychological well-being. IB and threat detection are inversely proportional. They are correlated to variables like motion graphic animation, eye movement, perceptual load and cycle, prioritization of animate objects for visual attention, intrinsic semantic content of stimuli, preattentive coding, etc, which are extensively studied.
Now let's discuss some findings of these studies. Wiemer et al. (2012) suggested unreported spider stimuli evoked higher SCRs than unreported flower stimuli. This represents the first peripheral physiological evidence of implicit perception in the IB paradigm supporting the assumption that unattended stimuli receive more elaborative processing. The study by Calvillo and Hawkins (2016) found that animate objects capture attention in the absence of task-relevant goals and that snakes do not show an advantage over other animate objects in inattentional blindness tasks.
The study by Gao and Jia (2016) suggested that participants under both high and low perceptual loads recognized the unexpected threats more frequently than neutral illustrations. The results also indicated that participants are biased to detect manmade and ontogenetic threats as rapidly as evolutionary and animate threats. The results of the study have been illustrated in the figure below.
Pammer et al. (2017) found that participants were twice as likely to miss a motorcycle compared with a taxi. Overall, 48% of participants did not report noticing the unexpected stimulus. People were significantly more likely to miss detecting the motorcycle (65%) on the critical trial than the taxi (31%). IB forms a good psychological framework for understanding LBFTS crashes, particularly in the context of attentional sets. The study by Fang et al. (2021) demonstrated that children who watched the animation were significantly more likely to detect unexpected snake images in the IB task than those who did not watch the animation. Children who watched the Motion Graphic animation showed a higher detection rate on the snake images. Results from the study are shown in the table below.
The IB study on LBFTS crashes is consequential; it implies that raising the expectation or experience of having motorcycles on roads could substantially alleviate such incidents. We observed that objects with higher levels of threat are more likely to be detected in a simulation. We also found that preattentive coding may occur in Inattentional Blindness (Pammer et al, 2015). In threatening scenarios, IB can be perilous. However, detection of threats, of a certain nature can in turn reduce IB. Despite some limitations, more extensive research on these interrelated concepts, can allow for intervention and prevention of hazards. Although the findings need to be further validated using a larger sample and a uniform presentation time of threatening stimuli, yet there is enough evidence that IB is strongly correlated to threat detection.
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