Inattentional Blindness: Perception without Attention

Abstract

Abstract This chapter summarizes a body of research done over the last five years in both the perception laboratory at the New School for Social Re search in New York and in Irvin Rock’ s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The majority of the research to be described here concerns a phenomenon we have named Inattentional Blindness (IB), which literally forced itself on our attention while we were studying perception under conditions of inattention. We begin by briefly summarizing some of the research that caused us to pay attention to 1B in the first place. This research project began as an attempt to determine: (1) whether grouping by Gestalt principles of organization occurred without attention, which most investigators have assumed to be the case (e.g., Treisman, 1982), and (2) whether the features which others have found to pop out when searched for in otherwise homogeneous arrays also were perceived under conditions of inattention. Because pop-out has been taken as an indicator of preattentive processing (e.g., Treisman & Gelade, 1980), we conjectured that most people, if asked, would assume that these features, too, would be perceived without attention.