Review
Attentional capture and inattentional blindness

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Abstract

Although we intuitively believe that salient or distinctive objects will capture our attention, surprisingly often they do not. For example, drivers may fail to notice another car when trying to turn or a person may fail to see a friend in a cinema when looking for an empty seat, even if the friend is waving. The study of attentional capture has focused primarily on measuring the effect of an irrelevant stimulus on task performance. In essence, these studies explore how well observers can ignore something they expect but know to be irrelevant. By contrast, the real-world examples above raise a different question: how likely are subjects to notice something salient and potentially relevant that they do not expect? Recently, several new paradigms exploring this question have found that, quite often, unexpected objects fail to capture attention, a phenomenon known as ‘inattentional blindness’. This review considers evidence for the effects of irrelevant features both on performance (‘implicit attentional capture’) and on awareness (‘explicit attentional capture’). Taken together, traditional studies of implicit attentional capture and recent studies of inattentional blindness provide a more complete understanding of the varieties of attentional capture, both in the laboratory and in the real world.

Section snippets

Implicit measures of attentional capture

Most recent studies of attentional capture have adapted methodologies used extensively in the study of visual search. Four distinct paradigms have been used to explore implicit attentional capture by measuring the effects of an irrelevant stimulus on performance of a primary task (see Table 1).

The logic underlying the ‘Additional Singleton’ task is the most intuitive of these paradigms: subjects perform a visual search task, and one item in the search display has a unique, distinctive feature

Explicit attentional capture (inattentional blindness)

Although we might intuitively believe that unusual, unexpected and salient objects will capture attention, leading to awareness, they often do not. Perhaps you have had an automobile accident and the other driver claimed he did not see you even though you were right in front of him. Of course, the driver’s performance might have been affected if your car implicitly captured attention, but that would do little to resolve the question of why he did not see you and it probably could not have

Conclusions

In the static IB paradigm, observers often fail to notice the onset of a new, unexpected object in the display. In some respects, this finding is consistent with findings from the Irrelevant Feature Search paradigm showing that when attention is focused on some other part of a display, an abrupt onset might not implicitly capture attention42. Implicit attentional capture in the Irrelevant Feature Search paradigm requires that attention must not be focused elsewhere. The static IB results are

Outstanding questions

  • Is the lack of explicit attentional capture specific to vision? Visual attention can focus exclusively on a single object or location, but perhaps auditory attention is less focused. If so, we might not need an attentional set to detect auditorily relevant stimuli. Real-world attentional capture often occurs in modalities other than vision, hence, studies of ‘inattentional deafness’ and attentional capture might be important.

  • Are there any cases in which explicit attentional capture consistently

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Christopher Chabris, Steve Most, Rebecca Reimer, Brian Scholl, and Steve Yantis for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The writing of this manuscript was supported in part by NSF grant no. BCS-9905578 and by a Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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