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We may fail to notice things in our environment because our attention is directed somewhere else, a phenomenon called inattentional blindness. Our susceptibility to inattentional blindness increases as we age. We explored three potential moderators of the age and inattentional blindness relationship: (1) the spatial proximity of the unexpected obje...
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... analysis included data from 618 participants who were recruited and tested on Amazon Mechanical Turk (425 females, Mean Age = 33.74, SD = 11.30, Median Age = 30, Min = 18, Max = 71; Fig. 2 shows the age distribution). All participants lived in the United States, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, were not color blind, passed an attention check test, and had not participated in a previous inattentional blindness experiment. ...
Citations
... For example, Graham and Burke (2011) replicated the Simons and Chabris (1999) study with younger and older adults and revealed that older adults were even more susceptible than younger adults to inattentional blindness in this task (i.e., much less likely to notice the gorilla). Other studies have replicated this increased susceptibility of older adults to exhibit inattentional blindness using a variety of computer-based paradigms (e.g., Stothart et al., 2015Stothart et al., , 2016Horwood and Beanland, 2016). Very little, however, has been explored with regards to whether age-related differences in inattentional blindness are also observed during complex and realistic everyday tasks such as driving. ...
Age-related changes to perceptual and cognitive abilities have been implicated in an increased risk of collision in older adults. This may be due, in part, to their reduced ability to attend to potentially relevant aspects of their driving environment. An associated general phenomenon of inattentional blindness involves a failure to notice visually presented objects or events when attention is directed elsewhere. Previous studies of inattentional blindness using computer paradigms report higher incidence of this effect in older compared to younger adults. However, little is known about whether these age-related effects are observed during more complex, realistic, everyday tasks, such as driving. Therefore, the goal of this study was to explore whether younger and older adults differ in their awareness of objects in their driving environment when their attention is directed toward another primary driving task. This study took place in a high-fidelity, full field of view, driving simulator. Thirty-two younger (Mage = 25.41) and 32 older (Mage = 73.41) adults drove through 19 short scenarios and were asked to first judge whether their vehicle could fit between two rows of vehicles parked on either side of the road and then to perform the associated driving maneuver (i.e., drive through or drive around). On four critical trials, objects were placed on the side of the road that differed in terms of animacy. Specifically, animate objects consisted of 3D humans standing by a bus shelter and inanimate objects consisted of photographs of the same individuals on a bus shelter advertisement. Inattentional blindness was measured via a post-drive, tablet-based recognition task immediately following the critical trials. Results revealed high rates of inattentional blindness across both age groups, with significantly lower levels of awareness for inanimate objects compared to animate objects. Further, whereas younger adults demonstrated reduced inattentional blindness following the first critical trial, older adults did not show this immediate improvement in recognition performance. Overall, this study provides unique insights into the factors associated with age-related changes to attention and how they may affect important driving-related outcomes.
... Inattentional blindness-the failure to notice unexpected objects or events when attention is otherwise occupied-has been observed in a wide range of contexts: during simple computer tasks (e.g., Mack & Rock, 1998), in videos (e.g., Simons & Chabris, 1999), while driving in a simulator (Most & Astur, 2007;Strayer, Drews, & Johnston, 2003), during real-world experiments (Chabris, Weinberger, Fontaine, & Simons, 2011), and in observational studies of typical behavior (Hyman et al., 2010). Noticing rates for unexpected objects vary with the age of the observer (Graham & Burke, 2011;Stothart, Boot, & Simons, 2015;Stothart et al., 2016), the salience of the object, and how well the object matches the observer's goals and attention set (Most, Scholl, Clifford, & Simons, 2005). Yet, anecdotes like the unexpected bear and looked-but-failed-to-see crashes suggest that even objects that pose a direct threat or risk to people might go unnoticed. ...
We sometimes fail to notice unexpected objects or events when our attention is directed elsewhere, a phenomenon called inattentional blindness. We explored whether unexpected objects that shared the color of consequential objects would be noticed more often. In three pre-registered experiments, participants played a custom video game in which they avoided both low-and high-cost missiles (Experiment 1 and 2) or tried to hit rewarding missiles while avoiding costly ones (Experiment 3). After participants had played the game for about 8 minutes, an unexpected object moved across the screen. Although participants selectively avoided more costly missiles when playing, they were no more likely to notice an unexpected object when its color was associated with greater costs. Apparently, people are no more likely to notice unexpected objects that are associated with negative consequences. Future research should examine whether objects that are themselves consequential are noticed more frequently.
