Inattentional Blindness

A recent mathematical treatment of Baars' Global Workspace consciousness model, much in the spirit of Dretske's communi- cation theory analysis of high level mental function, is used to study the eects of embedding cultural heritage on a general- ized form of inattentional blindenss. Culture should express itself quite distinctly in this basic psychophysical phenom- enon, acting across a variety of sensory and other modalities, because the limited syntactic and grammatical 'bandpass' of the topological rate distortion manifold characterizing con- scious attention is itself strongly sculpted by the constraints of cultural context.

The influence of expectation on inattentional blindness (IB) was investigated using a lexical-based IB task. In two
experiments, 235 participants performed word compilations from briefly presented letters and combinations of letters with
an  unexpected syllable appearing in  one of  the  trials. In  Experiment 1, we varied the  frequency and grammatical form
of the presented words, evaluating the role of “general” and “contextual” expectations. The results showed the effect of frequency but not of the grammatical form of the words. Experiment 2 controlled for the role of the state of completion of the word compilation in generating “contextual” expectations. We varied two factors: the state of completion of the word compilation during the onset of a new stimulus, and the role of the new stimulus in problem solving. Only the state of completion proved to be a significant factor for the occurrence of inattentional blindness.

This practice led research explored the nature of durational performances using a heuristic, self-as-artist approach, with a relationship to the spectator as a central consideration. It investigated multiple states of embodiment in the extended performance and explored how entrancement, gazing, drifting and inattentional blindness could be part of the affective experience. It focused on the corporeal as a site for understanding pre- coded body information, trauma and one’s immanent desires.

By using my own experience, I investigated the historical accumulation of coded information through the body’s memory, dreams and lived experiences. I located these as an embodied cultural mythos, the presence of which lies within the body. The solo performer was used as a conduit for somatic methodologies to collect materials based on chance discoveries for solo investigations, for collaboration, and for three live durational performances.

Performances of six, eight and twelve hours were drawn from the research, specifically crafted for an art gallery space, an adult night club and a theatre space, to explore the differences in engaging self and audience over extended periods of time. The theatre work consisted of two parts with a seven-hour improvisational performance leading up to a one-hour crafted performance. The research is based on these three performances and the stages of practical experimentation.

Theorist Elizabeth Behnke influenced discussions in this inquiry, with findings from psychologist Linda Holler and the references to one’s physical sensations influenced by neurologist Antonio Damasio. This dissertation reports and reflects upon the findings from my practice.

Our research examined the effects of hands-free cell-phone conversations on simulated driving. We found that even when participants looked directly at objects in the driving environment, they were less likely to create a durable memory of those objects if they were conversing on a cell phone. This pattern was obtained for objects of both high and low relevance, suggesting that very little semantic analysis of the objects occurs outside the restricted focus of attention. Moreover, in-vehicle conversations do not interfere with driving as much as cell-phone conversations do, because drivers are better able to synchronize the processing demands of driving with in-vehicle conversations than with cell-phone conversations. Together, these data support an inattention-blindness interpretation wherein the disruptive effects of cell-phone conversations on driving are due in large part to the diversion of attention from driving to the phone conversation.

OBJECTIVE:

Adults diagnosed with attentional deficit disorder (ADHD) are easily distracted in many tasks. Yet ADHD performance on inattentional blindness (IB) tasks has not been examined. Such investigation may aid in discriminating between 3 ADHD models: the neurological model, the perceptual load theory, and the "hunter versus farmer" hypothesis.
METHOD:

Distractibility was assessed in ADHD and non-ADHD college students using the MOXO task that involves detection of a single attended stimulus that repeatedly appears in the same place and in the well-known IB "gorilla" video which involves tracking of a stimulus moving at a fast pace in a dynamic, complex manner.
RESULTS:

ADHD college students showed increased distractibility in the MOXO task. By contrast, they performed better than controls in the attended channel of the IB task, while they were also better at noticing the unattended stimuli and thus exhibiting little-to-no inattentional blindness.
CONCLUSIONS:

As no attentional tradeoffs were evident in the IB task, it appears that the results are most consistent with the "hunter versus farmer" hypothesis, which postulates that ADHD individuals have an alternative cognitive style which is less equipped to deal with detection of repeated stimuli while comprising advantages in the tracking of stimuli moving in a fast dynamic manner.

What we cannot notice, we cannot be perceptually aware of either: This view, still very popular in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, has been recently defended by M. Tye and A. Noë. The present paper tries to undermine this idea by referring to some empirical cases showing that we can be perceptually aware of something which our thematic attention fails to grasp. The limits of perception do not coincide with the limits of attention, and this holds not only in the case of so called “primary attention,” but also in the case of “secondary attention.” We therefore reject Arvidson’s hypothesis of the identity between the field of attention and the field of consciousness.

The experiments reported extend the findings of our earlier paper, (Mack, Erol, & Clarke, 2015) and allow us to reject Bachmann and Aru's critique of our conclusion (2015) that IM requires attention. They suggested our manipulations, which diverted attention from a letter reporting task in a dual task procedure where the task-cue occurred after the array disappeared, might only have affected access to IM and not the "existence of the phenomenal experience". By further decreasing the probability of reporting letters to only 10% and adding a final trial in which the letter matrix was either completely absent or distorted, we found more than half our subjects were unaware of its absence, or distortion i.e., were inattentionally blind. We take this as powerful evidence against the existence of any phenomenal experience component of iconic memory and consistent with the view that iconic memory demands attention and that conscious perception does as well.

Does scene incongruity, (a mismatch between scene gist and a semantically incongruent object), capture attention and lead to conscious perception? We explored this question using 4 different procedures: Inattention (Experiment 1), Scene description (Experiment 2), Change detection (Experiment 3), and Iconic Memory (Experiment 4). We found no differences between scene incongruity and scene congruity in Experiments 1, 2, and 4, although in Experiment 3 change detection was faster for scenes containing an incongruent object. We offer an explanation for why the change detection results differ from the results of the other three experiments. In all four experiments, participants invariably failed to report the incongruity and routinely mis-described it by normalizing the incongruent object. None of the results supports the claim that semantic incongruity within a scene invariably captures attention and provide strong evidence of the dominant role of scene gist in determining what is perceived.

Sometimes we do not notice a salient object while being occupied with some attention-demanding task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). Nowadays the question of the origin of IB is posed in terms of the differentiation between the processes of attention and consciousness. The goal of the present study was to examine the correlates of object-based attention (SN), early visual awareness (VAN), and late-visual awareness (300 ms after the presentation) in the IB condition. Our experiment used a modified version of the method of Koivisto and colleagues (Koivisto, Kainulainen & Revonsuo, 2009). Subjects were presented with two different letter stimuli that could be masked; subjects responded either that they saw or didn’t see the target letter (in the attended or unattended field) whenever it appeared. IB was considered as a condition when subjects responded "I do not see" when the unmasked target letter was presented in an unattended field. Our study showed that in a condition of IB the correlate of object-based attention (SN) was detected in the absence of the conscious processing component (P300). This, together with the absence of the lack of verbal reporting in later stages of processing, implies that the process of early stimuli discrimination might take place.  Thus the response "I do not see" in the IB condition in our study could be associated with underachieving in the last stage of stimulus processing, which is “access consciousness”.

Our research examined the effects of hands-free cell-phone conversations on simulated driving. We found that even when participants looked directly at objects in the driving environment, they were less likely to create a durable memory of those objects if they were conversing on a cell phone. This pattern was obtained for objects of both high and low relevance, suggesting that very little semantic analysis of the objects occurs outside the restricted focus of attention. Moreover, in-vehicle conversations do not interfere with driving as much as cell-phone conversations do, because drivers are better able to synchronize the processing demands of driving with in-vehicle conversations than with cell-phone conversations. Together, these data support an inattention-blindness interpretation wherein the disruptive effects of cell-phone conversations on driving are due in large part to the diversion of attention from driving to the phone conversation.

An inattentional blindness paradigm was adapted to measure ERPs elicited by visual contour patterns that were or were not consciously perceived. In the first phase of the experiment, subjects performed an attentionally demanding task while task-irrelevant line segments formed square-shaped patterns or random configurations. After the square patterns had been presented 240 times, subjects' awareness of these patterns was assessed. More than half of all subjects, when queried, failed to notice the square patterns and were thus considered inattentionally blind during this first phase. In the second phase of the experiment, the task and stimuli were the same, but following this phase, all of the subjects reported having seen the patterns. ERPs recorded over the occipital pole differed in amplitude from 220 to 260 msec for the pattern stimuli compared with the random arrays regardless of whether subjects were aware of the patterns. At subsequent latencies (300–340 msec) however, ERPs...