The Impact Of Attentional Set For Inattentional Blindness And Attention Capture

Inattentional blindness and attention capture are the 2 traditionally separate research programs. Inattentional blindness refers to failures to notice unexpected objects and events when attention is otherwise engaged. Attention capture research has traditionally used implicit indices (e.g.,response times) to investigate automatic shifts of attention. Because of attention capture usually measures performance whereas inattentional blindness measures awareness, the 2 fields have existed side by side with no shared theoretical framework. A major goal of this article reports a theoretical and experimental attempt to bridge these two fields. This article propose that the most influential factor affecting noticing is a person's attentional set, which appears to be a link between inattentional blindness and attention capture. Then the properties of an unexpected object match those of attentional set which to determine the capture of awareness. If the properties do not match, inattentional blindness can occur without awareness. We first highlighted the gap between them in attention literature, then bridged the gap with an attentional set theoretical framework supported by four experiments.In experiments 1-3, we found that the likelihood of noticing an unexpected object was powerfully mediated by a person's attentional set. When the expected object was visually similar along a critical dimension to an attended set of items, people were likely to notice it. However, noticing greatly decreased when the expected object was similar along the critical dimension to the distracters, even when the object contained a unique feature (Experiment 2). It is important to note that this attentional set effect generalized across several dimensions. The similar results in Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that people could establish effective attentional sets on the basis of simple features like luminance and shape. In both studies, the unexpected object was an additional circle among black and white shapes, but in Experiment 2 the additional circle was gray, making it more distinctive than the black unexpected circle in Experiment 1. Despite its greater distinctiveness, the gray circle was not noticed substantially more than the unexpected black circle had been. In Experiment 3 ,we found evidence that such attentional sets could also be based on complex features, such as those that differentiate between faces, and people are typically faster to locate a cross-race face among same-race ones than vice versa. It has been suggested that race may be processed as more of a feature for cross-race than same-race faces. In summary, people appear capable of establishing an attentional set-successfully filtering even unexpected information from conscious awareness-on the basis of a range of feature that might distinguish attended from ignored items during a selective looking task.The results of Experiment 4 demonstrated that how bottom-up process and attentional set combine to determine the capture of awareness. Participants were more likely to notice a salient, unexpected white triangle among black targets and distracters than an unexpected black triangle. Some bottom-up properties such as salience, influence the likelihood that someone will notice an unexpected object, but it does not to match the power of attentional set in influencing attention capture. In summary, the probability that people will notice an unexpected object depends on what they have set their minds to see or to ignore.