Inattentional Blindness in Psychology

Inattentional blindness involves failing to perceive something because your attention is focused on something else, such as a task, object, or person. For example, intentional blindness can often contribute to traffic accidents when a driver’s attention is elsewhere, causing them to miss important information.

Understanding Inattentional Blindness

The term “inattentional blindness” was first coined by psychologists Arien Mack, PhD, and Irvin Rock, PhD. They observed the phenomenon during their perception and attention experiments.

They described it as a type of ‘sighted blindness’ leading to an inability to perceive relevant environmental stimuli.

Inattentional blindness is one type of visual awareness failure that might cause you to miss seemingly obvious things around you, like a deer darting into the road or continuity errors in movies.

When you focus hard on one thing, you miss other important details that are right in front of you. For example, when you are focused on the actions of the main character in a film, you might not notice unexpected things entering your visual field.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment

One of the best-known experiments demonstrating inattentional blindness is the “invisible gorilla test” carried out by Christopher Chabris, PhD, and Daniel Simons, PhD. In this experiment, researchers asked participants to watch a video of people tossing a basketball. Observers were told to count the number of passes or to keep track of the number of throws versus bounce passes.

But in reality, something odd had happened. Sometimes, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit strolled through the scene, turned to the camera, thumped her chest, and walked away.

While it may seem impossible that the participants missed such a sight since their attention was focused elsewhere and on a demanding task, intentional blindness essentially made the gorilla invisible.

What Causes Inattentional Blindness

The exact reasons why inattentional blindness happens are still not fully understood, but psychologists believe that a few different factors appear to play a role.

Limited Attentional Resources

The fact is that our attentional and processing capabilities are limited. Because of this, we have to find ways of filtering out distractions in order to focus on what’s most relevant to us at any given moment.

Rather than focusing on every tiny detail in the world around us, we tend to concentrate on things that are most important, relying on our existing schemas to “fill in the blanks.” This approach is highly economical.

Salience of the Stimuli

One of the reasons why people so often “miss the gorilla,” so to speak, is simply because the stimulus does not fit into their idea of what a basketball game is supposed to look like. A gorilla showing up in the middle of a basketball game is unlikely to happen in a real-world setting, so we are less likely to notice it.

That said, while we do sometimes fail to miss things in the world around us, we are generally pretty good at noticing information that is relevant to us, such as a car speeding toward us or a deer jumping out of the trees into the road. Of course, this is not always the case.

Limitations of Memory

Some researchers suggest that memory limitations might contribute to inattentional blindness. Some experiments suggest that people do perceive this information; they just don’t recall seeing it when asked because it was not encoded in short-term memory.

Such findings suggest that this might not be intentional blindness as much as it is intentional amnesia.

Factors That Influence Inattentional Blindness

There are certain factors that can affect inattentional blindness.

Similarity to Attended Stimuli

In the original invisible gorilla experiment, the participants had to count the number of passes made by either the team in black or the team in white.

Out of the participants who counted passes made by the white team, only 42% saw the gorilla, but for the participants who counted passes made by the black team, 83% saw the gorilla—who was also dressed in black.

Conditions That Affect Attention

Researchers have found that adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a condition characterized by difficulty maintaining attention and being easily distracted, are actually less likely to be affected by inattentional blindness.

According to the researchers, this may happen because people with ADHD have a different cognitive style that, while making it more difficult to attend to repeated stimuli, gives them an edge when it comes to noticing novel or dynamic stimuli in their visual environment.

Age

Evidence also seems to suggest that intentional blindness tends to become worse as people grow older. In one study, 89% of older adults experienced inattentional blindness on a detection task, whereas only 5% of younger adults did.

Examples of Inattentional Blindness

We all experience inattentional blindness from time to time, such as in these potential situations:

• Even though you think you are paying attention to the road, you fail to notice a car swerving into your lane of traffic, resulting in a traffic accident.
• You are watching a historical film set in ancient Greece. You don’t notice a significant blooper in which an airplane appears in the background of a pivotal scene.
• You decide to make a phone call while driving through busy traffic. You fail to notice that the traffic light has turned red, so you run the stop light and get a traffic ticket.
• While playing a video game, you are so intently focused on spotting a specific type of “bad guy” that you miss another threat to your character and lose the game.

It has been implicated in traffic accidents. Research suggests that both younger and older drivers tend to be more prone to the effects of inattentional blindness, which may be linked to the increased rates of traffic accidents in both age groups.

In the workplace, intentional blindness can also contribute to accidents that affect safety and well-being. While it has been suggested that expertise and experience might mitigate such effects, research has found that expertise appears to have no influence on whether or not people experience intentional blindness.