Impact of Inattention Blindness on Minds' Vision and Awareness Ability

Human Mind Lab Report
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Abstract
Inattention blindness phenomenon relates to other similar problems such as change blindness and attentional blink and visual masking. For this reason, there are a lot of literature about the occurrence which has been proven through experiments that involves critical trials that features objects, motions and images appearing unexpectedly while the viewer are preoccupied by other tasks. The study used the colour changing card trick experiment, which featured 836 psychology undergraduate students from who were enrolled in The Human Mind. The participants’ age and gender were not recorded. The objective of the study was to underpin and validate the existing claims about the in attention blindness. The experiment revealed that the participants with no warming recorded a mean of 1.06 changes and a Standard deviation 1.32 changes, whereas the participants with the warning condition recorded a mean of 0.53 changes and a standard deviation and 1.14 changes. The results of the independent samples t-test was t (834) = 5.99, p < .001. The findings revealed that observers’ ability to notice unexpected objects in a scene is lowers when they are warned and improved when they are not warned because alerting tend to cause a distraction where observers tend to perform selective looking.
An Experiment to Demonstrate the Impact of Inattention Blindness on Humans Minds’ Vision and Awareness Ability
Introduction
Imagine you are in an airport situation waiting for an old friend who has been abroad for almost a decade. Standing at the airport’s terminal waiting for your long-time friend to emerge from the crowd of arriving travelers can be difficult since you are not sure of your friend’s appearance after 10 years. Therefore, you will be obliged to be scrutinize careful on each passengers passing to identify any familiar expressions or signal. At this juncture, you are likely to miss any other drama or event that might transpire in your visual field since all of your attention is placed the arrival of the friend and not expecting anything to happen in the background. On the event when one is informed on what to expect, for example a back flip in the crowd of passengers, they will focus much on the expected event hence overlooking any of the succeeding events because familiarity or notification expected does not improve detection of unexpected events. The evidences surrounding this scenario is called international which was established through experimental approaches that were conducted by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992. Inattention blindness is defined as as psychological phenomenon whereby an individual fails to see or notice events or motions on sight because they had placed more attention on something else, and the the other occurrences are unexpected.
Caters, Chalmers and Ledda (2002) attempted to demonstrate the inattention blindness phenomenon using the eye tracking applications from a computer graphics perspectives. The participants were asked to focus on a cup appearing on a non-moving computer and count the number of pencils inside (Caters, Chalmers, & Ledda, 2012). While counting the pencils, the graphics on the background of the screen were varied from between high and low quality. The eye tracking device revealed that 60% of the participants failed to notice the quality variation of the screen graphics because they mainly dwell on counting the pencil in the cup (Caters, Chalmers, & Ledda, 2012). The study supports the idea of intentional blindness that individual are likely to miss the changing vision when they are preoccupied with others events. Another study by Simons, D. J. (2012) using the Gorilla and Basketball Game video underpins the understanding of the intentional blindness. In the video, the viewers were asked to count the number of passes made by the players in white T-shirts in group of players in black and white pictures. Midway in the video, a lady in a black gorilla gear passed through the players and stare directly to the vision field (Simons, 2010). The findings revealed that 90% of the viewers missed the emergence of the gorilla in the scenes. In the next sequel, viewers were expecting the gorilla to make an appearance, which did appear because the participants were alerted due to familiarity (Simons, 2010). However, all all the viewers failed to notice the following changes in the video such the color changing of the curtain the background and and one player leaving the scene. In an explanation, Simons asserted that the inability to notice the secondary activities on the videos does not heavily depends on the vision limitation on the eyes but rather on the mind. Additionally, Simons argues that human minds intentionally visualize only a small subsection of our visual world, especially when our attention is fixate on one thing, we are unable to identify other untargeted events around including those we may plan to see.
Keywords
Inattention blindness: Refers to individual inability notice or identify clear, salient and visible objects, motions or changes on the visual fields when they are preoccupied with primary events or acts of interests that captures their whole awareness.
Attention: Refers to an act of notice is keenness place on someone or something that is important.
Vision: Refers to situation whereby individuals experiences vivid or imaginative things, events of images in their mind.
The paper intents to demonstrate the nature of inattention blindness with the aid of the color changing card trick experiment, the methodology is to subject 836 psychology undergraduate students regardless of the gender. Thereafter, the participants are split into a group of 430 participants receiving no warning and 406 participants receiving a warning, whereby the latter group is divided is used more as a control experiment. The participants are expected to record the data I terms of how many changes that they had seen, participants watched the rest of the video to see where the changes occurred. The number of changes detected (ranging from 0 to 4) was the dependent variable in the study.
The aim of the study is to elaborate on the already exiting literature on inattention blindness and demonstrate how inattention blindness to proving that an individual is not able to see everything in their field of view in spite of having having their eyes open. The findings of the experiment proves that inattention blindness hampers individuals’ vision and attention when observing a particular event. Based on other studies, it is intelligent to hypothesize that individuals who will able to see between 2 and 4 changes in the color changing card trick experiment are deemed less affected by inattention blindness whereas the participants who manage to notice only between 0 and 1 change are considered victims of inattention blindness. Eventually, this experiment attempts to confirm the both the on the objective and subjective data from gathered through eye tracking and from previous studies related to inattention blindness respectively.
Method
Participants
Participants were 836 psychology undergraduate students from who were enrolled in The Human Mind. Participants’ age and gender were not recorded. 
Materials and Procedure
Participants took part in the study in their seminar groups either on-campus or online. Half of the seminar groups were randomly assigned to the no warning condition and the other half were assigned to the warning condition. This resulted in 430 participants receiving no warning and 406 participants receiving a warning.
Participants were instructed by their tutors that they would be collecting data for their lab reports. Participants in the no warning condition were told, “Your seminar group is in the NO WARNING condition. Please watch the following video carefully.” Participants in t...