You open the refrigerator looking for the ketchup but you don’t see it. You ask your spouse “Where did you put the ketchup?” They look and say “It’s right there in front of you!” And then, surprised, suddenly you see it. You have just experienced inattentional blindness (IB).
Inattentional Blindness happens to most of us everyday. It may manifest as “refrigerator blindness” or “pantry blindness” or, more seriously, “pedestrian blindness” while driving. But what causes IB? There are two main theories: Attention Set and Load Theory (Attention Capacity). Attention Set predicts IB will occur when a person is looking for one thing and doesn’t see something else, which doesn’t seem to fit the “refrigerator blindness” example but could explain “pedestrian blindness”. Load Theory, on the other hand, predicts IB will occur when attention capacity is somehow overloaded, which could explain both refrigerator and pedestrian blindness. Hutchinson and colleagues set out to discover whether data from 81 different studies testing one or both of the theories could help determine which theory did a better job overall of explaining IB. Their conclusion: both theories do a pretty good job of explaining Inattentional Blindness but do so under different circumstances.
Continue reading “It’s Right in Front of You!”
Dr Martin Fracker 