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inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness is an inability to perceive something that is within one's direct perceptual field because one is attending to something else. The term was coined by psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, who identified the phenomenon while studying the relationship of attention to perception. They were able to show that, under a number of different conditions, if subjects were not attending to a visual stimulus but were attending to something else in the visual field, a significant percentage of the subjects were "blind" to something that was right before their eyes.

Because this inability to perceive, this sighted blindness, seemed to be caused by the fact that subjects were not attending to the stimulus but instead were attending to something else ... we labeled this phenomenon inattentional blindness (IB).*

Mack and Rock go on to argue that, in their view, "there is no conscious perception without attention."

Others, such as U. Neisser, D. Simons, and C. Chabris, have replicated and extended the work of Mack and Rock with experiments that have subjects attending to a specific task while watching a film, such as counting how many times a basketball is passed from one team member to another, while someone walks through the scene carrying an umbrella or wearing a gorilla suit. A surprisingly large percentage of subjects do not perceive something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit moving through the scene they are observing, if they are attending to something else in their visual field. (Several examples of these experiments can be viewed on the Visual Cognition Lab page of the University of Illinois.)

Inattentional blindness may explain, for example, how a pilot with an interest in crop circles could fly right over one without even noticing it. The pilot had flown to see a recently discovered crop circle near Stonehenge. After visiting the site, he flew back to the airport to refuel before setting off on a trip that took him back over the site he had just visited. On the return flight he noticed another crop circle near the one he had visited earlier in the day and swears that the new circle was not there just forty-five minutes earlier. The new circle is very elaborate and could not have been produced by human hoaxers in such a short time. He concludes that some mysterious force must have been at work. Perhaps, but it seems more likely that the pilot experienced inattentional blindness when he was flying to the airport. He was focused on other tasks when he flew over the site and didn’t notice what was right beneath him all the time. (See "Crop Circles - Quest for Truth," ISBN: 0738926299.)

See also change blindness and confabulation.

further reading

• Visual Cognition Lab - University of Illinois (teachers may be interested in purchasing the DVD the VCL sells)
• Inattentional Blindness - An Overview by Arien Mack & Irvin Rock
• David Chalmers's list of papers on change blindness and inattentional blindness
• The Choice Blindness lab

Simons, Daniel J. and  Christopher F. Chabris. (1999). "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events." Perception, 1999, volume 28, pages 1059-1074.

Mack, Arien and Irvin Rock. (2000). Inattentional Blindness. MIT Press.  

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