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A long-standing question concerns whether sensory input can reach semantic stages of processing in the absence of attention and awareness. Here, we examine whether the N400, an event related potential associated with semantic processing, can occur under conditions of inattentional blindness. By employing a novel three-phase inattentional blindness paradigm designed to maximise the opportunity for detecting an N400, we found no evidence for it when participants were inattentionally blind to the eliciting stimuli (related and unrelated word pairs). In contrast, participants noticed the same task-irrelevant word pairs when minimal attention was allocated to them, and a small N400 became evident. When the same stimuli were fully attended and relevant to the task, a robust N400 was observed. In addition to univariate ERP measures, multivariate decoding analyses were unable to classify related from unrelated word pairs when observers were inattentionally blind to the words, with decoding reaching above-chance levels only when the words were (at least minimally) attended. By comparison, decoding reached above-chance levels when contrasting word pairs with non-word stimuli, even when participants were inattentionally blind to these stimuli. Our results also replicated several previous studies by finding a "visual awareness negativity" (VAN) that distinguished task-irrelevant stimuli that participants noticed compared with those that were not perceived, and a P3b (or "late positivity") that was evident only when the stimuli were task relevant. Together, our findings suggest that semantic processing might require at least a minimal amount of attention.

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Semantic relatedness and expectation were investigated in inattentional blindness-failure to perceive an unexpected object in plain sight when attention is engaged elsewhere. Participants named primary-task pictures and ignored distractor pictures. Four trials preceded a 'critical' trial where an unexpected six-letter-word appeared at fixation, simultaneously with the pictures. In Experiment 1, we found robust effects for both in-lab and on-line-Zoom methodology. More participants reported the unexpected word semantically-related to the primary-task pictures than a semantically-unrelated word. In Experiment 2, expectations were violated, by changing the semantic category of the primary-task pictures. More participants reported the unexpected word semantically-related to the unexpected picture category than a semantically-unrelated word. When attentional resources are consumed by a task, a violation to task expectations is not enough to reorient attention to an unexpected word. Attention reorients to what is meaningful to the task, and what is meaningful is updated in light of unexpected information.

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PURPOSE: Medical errors may be occasionally explained by inattentional blindness (IB), i.e., failing to notice an event/object that is in plain sight. We aimed to determine whether age/experience, restfulness/fatigue, and previous exposure to simulation education may affect IB in the anesthetic/surgical setting. METHODS: In this multicentre/multinational study, a convenience sample of 280 anesthesiologists watched an attention-demanding video of a simulated trauma patient undergoing laparotomy and (independently/anonymously) recorded the abnormalities they noticed. The video contained four expected/common abnormalities (hypotension, tachycardia, hypoxia, hypothermia) and two prominently displayed unexpected/rare events (patient's head movement, leaky central venous line). We analyzed the participants' ability to notice the expected/unexpected events (primary outcome) and the proportion of expected/unexpected events according to age group and prior exposure to simulation education (secondary outcomes). RESULTS: Anesthesiologists across all ages noticed fewer unexpected/rare events than expected/common ones. Overall, younger anesthesiologists missed fewer common events than older participants did (P = 0.02). There was no consistent association between age and perception of unexpected/rare events (P = 0.28), although the youngest cohort (< 30 yr) outperformed the other age groups. Prior simulation education did not affect the proportion of misses for the unexpected/rare events but was associated with fewer misses for the expected/common events. Self-perceived restfulness did not impact perception of events. CONCLUSION: Anesthesiologists noticed fewer unexpected/rare clinical events than expected/common ones in an attention-demanding video of a simulated trauma patient, in keeping with IB. Prior simulation training was associated with an improved ability to notice anticipated/expected events, but did not reduce IB. Our findings may have implications for understanding medical mishaps, and efforts to improve situational awareness, especially in acute perioperative and critical care settings.

RéSUMé: OBJECTIF: Les erreurs médicales peuvent parfois s'expliquer par la cécité d'inattention, soit le fait de ne pas remarquer un événement/objet qui est à la vue de tous et toutes. Notre objectif était de déterminer si l'âge/l'expérience, le repos/la fatigue et l'exposition antérieure à l'enseignement par simulation pouvaient affecter la cécité d'inattention dans le cadre de l'anesthésie/chirurgie. MéTHODE: Dans cette étude multicentrique/multinationale, un échantillon de convenance de 280 anesthésiologistes ont visionné une vidéo exigeant l'attention portant sur un patient de trauma simulé bénéficiant d'une laparotomie et ont enregistré (de manière indépendante/anonyme) les anomalies qu'ils et elles ont remarquées. La vidéo contenait quatre anomalies attendues/courantes (hypotension, tachycardie, hypoxie, hypothermie) et deux événements inattendus/rares bien en vue (mouvement de la tête du patient, fuite du cathéter veineux central). Nous avons analysé la capacité des participant·es à remarquer les événements attendus/inattendus (critère d'évaluation principal) et la proportion d'événements attendus/inattendus selon le groupe d'âge et l'exposition antérieure à l'enseignement par simulation (critères d'évaluation secondaires). RéSULTATS: Les anesthésiologistes de tous âges ont remarqué moins d'événements inattendus/rares que d'événements attendus/courants. Globalement, les anesthésiologistes plus jeunes ont manqué moins d'événements courants que leurs congénères plus âgé·es (P = 0,02). Il n'y avait pas d'association constante entre l'âge et la perception d'événements inattendus ou rares (P = 0,28), bien que la cohorte la plus jeune (< 30 ans) ait surpassé les autres groupes d'âge. La formation antérieure par simulation n'a pas eu d'incidence sur la proportion d'inobservation des événements inattendus ou rares, mais a été associée à moins de cécité d'inattention envers les événements attendus ou courants. Le repos perçu n'a pas eu d'impact sur la perception des événements. CONCLUSION: Les anesthésiologistes ont remarqué moins d'événements cliniques inattendus/rares que d'événements attendus/courants dans une vidéo exigeant l'attention portant sur la simulation d'un patient traumatisé, ce qui s'inscrit dans la cécité d'inattention. La formation préalable par simulation était associée à une meilleure capacité à remarquer les événements anticipés/attendus, mais ne réduisait pas la cécité d'inattention. Nos résultats peuvent avoir des implications pour la compréhension des accidents médicaux et les efforts visant à améliorer la conscience situationnelle, en particulier dans les contextes de soins périopératoires aigus et de soins intensifs.

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Peripheral vision is limited due to several factors, such as visual resolution, crowding, and attention. When attention is not directed towards a stimulus, detection, discrimination, and identification are often compromised. Recent studies have found a new phenomenon that strongly limits peripheral vision, "redundancy masking". In redundancy masking, the number of perceived items in repeating patterns is reduced. For example, when presenting three lines in the peripheral visual field and asking participants to report the number of lines, often only two lines are reported. Here, we investigated what role attention plays in redundancy masking. If redundancy masking was due to limited attention to the target, it should be stronger when less attention is allocated to the target, and absent when attention is maximally focused on the target. Participants were presented with line arrays and reported the number of lines in three cueing conditions (i.e., single cue, double cue, and no cue). Redundancy masking was observed in all cueing conditions, with observers reporting fewer lines than presented in the single, double, and no cue conditions. These results suggest that redundancy masking is not due to limited attention. The number of lines reported was closer to the correct number of lines in the single compared to the double and the no cue conditions, suggesting that reduced attention additionally compromised stimulus discrimination, and replicating typical effects of diminished attention. Taken together, our results suggest that the extent of attention to peripherally presented stimuli modulates discrimination performance, but does not account for redundancy masking.

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Unconscious processing has been widely examined using diverse and well-controlled methodologies. However, the extent to which these findings are relevant to real-life instances of information processing without awareness is limited. Here, we present a novel inattentional blindness (IB) paradigm in virtual reality (VR). In three experiments, we managed to repeatedly induce IB while participants foveally viewed salient stimuli for prolonged durations. The effectiveness of this paradigm demonstrates the close relationship between top-down attention and subjective experience. Thus, this method provides an ecologically valid setup to examine processing without awareness.

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People often fail to notice the presence of unexpected objects when their attention is engaged elsewhere. In dichotic listening tasks, for example, people often fail to notice unexpected content in the ignored speech stream even though they occasionally do notice highly familiar stimuli like their own name (the "cocktail party" effect). Some of the first studies of inattentional blindness were designed as a visual analog of such dichotic listening studies, but relatively few inattentional blindness studies have examined how familiarity affects noticing. We conducted four preregistered inattentional blindness experiments (total N = 1700) to examine whether people are more likely to notice a familiar unexpected object than an unfamiliar one. Experiment 1 replicated evidence for greater noticing of upright schematic faces than inverted or scrambled ones. Experiments 2-4 tested whether participants from different pairs of countries would be more likely to notice their own nation's flag or petrol company logo than those of another country. These experiments repeatedly found little or no evidence that familiarity affects noticing rates for unexpected objects. Frequently encountered and highly familiar stimuli do not appear to overcome inattentional blindness.

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People often fail to notice unexpected objects and events when they are performing an attention-demanding task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. We might expect individual differences in cognitive ability or personality to predict who will and will not notice unexpected objects given that people vary in their ability to perform attention-demanding tasks. We conducted a comprehensive literature search for empirical inattentional blindness reports and identified 38 records that included individual difference measures and met our inclusion criteria. From those, we extracted individual difference effect sizes for 31 records which included a total of 74 distinct, between-groups samples with at least one codable individual difference measure. We conducted separate meta-analyses of the relationship between noticing/missing an unexpected object and scores on each of the 14 cognitive and 19 personality measures in this dataset. We also aggregated across personality measures reflecting positive/negative affectivity or openness/absorption and cognitive measures of interference, attention breadth, and memory. Collectively, these meta-analyses provided little evidence that individual differences in ability or personality predict noticing of an unexpected object. A robustness analysis that excluded samples with extremely low numbers of people who noticed or missed produced similar results. For most measures, the number of samples and the total sample sizes were small, and larger studies are needed to examine individual differences in inattentional blindness more systematically. However, the results are consistent with the idea that noticing of unexpected objects or events differs from deliberate attentional control tasks in that it is not reliably predicted by individual differences in cognitive ability.

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OBJECTIVE: This study was performed to estimate the effectiveness of novel oral hygiene instruction (OHI) focusing on areas with deep periodontal pockets for reduction of periodontal inflammation. BACKGROUND DATA DISCUSSING THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE FIELD: Because stained areas on the plaque chart do not always correspond to the areas with deep periodontal pockets, conventional OHI based on O'Leary's plaque control record (PCR) often provides guidance inconsistent with the target area. METHODS: This randomized clinical trial involved two groups: (1) OHI based on the PCR limited in deep pocket sites (novel OHI group) and (2) OHI based on O'Leary's PCR (conventional OHI group). The unique PCR (aggressive target for PCR [agPCR]; only counting the plaque-stained areas with PD at ≥4 mm sites) for the novel OHI was calculate by dedicated expression program. The probing depth (PD), bleeding on probing (BOP), and periodontal inflamed surface area (PISA) were obtained at the baseline and 5 to 6 months later. RESULTS: The approximation curve with PISA before and after instruction indicated that the PISA converged to a lower value after instruction in the novel OHI group. The approximation curve with the improvement rate of the PISA and agPCR showed a positive correlation in the novel OHI group but no correlation in the conventional OHI group. CONCLUSION: Control of inflammation was more effective in the novel OHI group. These results suggest that this novel OHI technique using our developed application could be used as a strategy to improve the effectiveness of brushing instruction.

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Inattentional blindness is a phenomenon wherein people fail to perceive obvious stimuli within their vision, sometimes leading to dramatic consequences. Research on the effects of fear chemosignals suggests that they facilitate receivers' sensory acquisition. We aimed to examine the interplay between these phenomena, investigating whether exposure to fear chemosignals (vs. rest body odors) can reduce the inattentional-blindness handicap. Utilizing a virtual-reality aquarium, we asked participants to count how many morsels a school of fish consumed while two unexpected stimuli swam by. We predicted that participants exposed to fear chemosignals (N = 131) would detect unexpected stimuli significantly more often than participants exposed to rest body odors (N = 125). All participants were adult Portuguese university students aged 18 to 40 years. The results confirmed our hypothesis, χ2(1) = 6.10, p = .014, revealing that exposure to fear chemosignals significantly increased the detection of unexpected stimuli by about 10%. The implications of our findings open a novel avenue for reducing the adverse consequences of inattentional blindness.

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Sometimes we look but fail to see: our car keys on a cluttered desk, a repeated word in a carefully proofread email, or a motorcycle at an intersection. Wolfe and colleagues present a unifying, mechanistic framework for understanding these "Looked But Failed to See" errors, explaining how such misses arise from natural constraints on human visual processing. Here, we offer a conceptual taxonomy of six distinct ways we might be said to fail to see, and explore: how these relate to processes in Wolfe et al.'s model; how they can be distinguished experimentally; and, why the differences matter.

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When focusing attention on some objects and ignoring others, people often fail to notice the presence of an additional, unexpected object (inattentional blindness). In general, people are more likely to notice when the unexpected object is similar to the attended items and dissimilar from the ignored ones. Perhaps surprisingly, current evidence suggests that this similarity effect results almost entirely from dissimilarity to the ignored items, and it remains unclear whether similarity to the attended items affects noticing. Other aspects of similarity have not been examined at all, including whether the similarity of the attended and ignored items to each other affects noticing of a distinct unexpected object. We used a sustained inattentional blindness task to examine all three aspects of similarity. Experiment 1 (n = 813) found no evidence that increasing the similarity of the attended and ignored items to each other affected noticing of an unexpected object. Experiment 2 (n = 610) provided some of the first compelling evidence that similarity to the attended items - in addition to the ignored items - affects noticing. Experiment 3 (n = 1,044) replicated that pattern and showed that noticing rates varied with the degree of similarity to the ignored shapes but not to the attended shapes, suggesting that suppression of ignored items functions differently from the enhancement of attended items.

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The growing number of people with cognitive impairment will significantly increase healthcare demand. Screening tools are crucial for detecting cognitive impairment due to a shortage of mental health experts aiming to improve the quality of life for those living with this condition. Eye tracking is a powerful tool that can provide deeper insights into human behavior and inner cognitive processes. The proposed Eye-Tracking-Based Trail-Making Test, ETMT, is a screening tool for monitoring a person's cognitive function. The proposed system utilizes a fuzzy-inference system as an integral part of its framework to calculate comprehensive scores assessing visual search speed and focused attention. By employing an adaptive neuro-fuzzy-inference system, the tool provides an overall cognitive-impairment score, allowing psychologists to assess and quantify the extent of cognitive decline or impairment in their patients. The ETMT model offers a comprehensive understanding of cognitive abilities and identifies potential deficits in various domains. The results indicate that the ETMT model is a potential tool for evaluating cognitive impairment and can capture significant changes in eye movement behavior associated with cognitive impairment. It provides a convenient and affordable diagnosis, prioritizing healthcare resources for severe conditions while enhancing feedback to practitioners.

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In road traffic, mental overload often leads to a failure to notice new and distinctive stimuli. Such phenomenon is known as 'inattentional blindness'. Safe and efficient interaction between automated vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians is expected to rely heavily on external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs), a tool AVs are equipped with to communicate their intentions to pedestrians. This study seeks to explore the phenomenon of 'inattentional blindness' in the context of pedestrian-AV interactions. Specifically, the aim is to understand the effects of a warning eHMI on pedestrians' crossing decisions when they are engaged in a secondary task. In an experiment study with videos of pedestrian crossing scenarios filmed from the perspective of the crossing pedestrian, participants had to decide the latest point at which they would be willing to cross the road in front of an AV with an eHMI vs. an AV without an eHMI. Participants were also asked to predict the future behavior of the AV. 125 female and 9 male participants aged between 18 and 25 completed the experiment and a follow-up questionnaire. It was found that the presence of a warning eHMI on AVs contributes to a clearer understanding of pedestrians' inferences about the intention of AVs and helps deter late and dangerous crossing decisions made by pedestrians. However, the eHMI fail to help pedestrians avoid such decisions when they face a high mental workload induced by secondary task engagement.

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Previous research on emotional face processing has shown that emotional faces such as fearful faces may be processed without visual awareness. However, evidence for nonconscious attention capture by fearful faces is limited. In fact, studies using sensory manipulation of awareness (e.g., backward masking paradigms) have shown that fearful faces do not attract attention during subliminal viewings nor when they were task-irrelevant. Here, we used a three-phase inattentional blindness paradigm and electroencephalography to examine whether faces (fearful and neutral) capture attention under different conditions of awareness and task-relevancy. We found that the electrophysiological marker for attention capture, the N2-posterior-contralateral (N2pc), was elicited by face stimuli only when participants were aware of the faces and when they were task-relevant (phase 3). When participants were unaware of the presence of faces (phase 1) or when the faces were irrelevant to the task (phase 2), no N2pc was observed. Together with our previous work, we concluded that fearful faces, or faces in general, do not attract attention unless we want them to.

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The animate monitoring hypothesis (AMH) purports that humans evolved specialized mechanisms that prioritize attention to animates over inanimates. Importantly, the hypothesis emphasizes that any animate-an entity that can move on its own-should take priority in attention. While many experiments have found general support for this hypothesis, there have yet been no systematic investigations into whether the type of animate matters for animate monitoring. In the present research we addressed this issue across three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 53) searched for an animate or inanimate entity in a search task, and the animate was either a mammal or a non-mammal (e.g., bird, reptile, insect). Mammals were found significantly faster than inanimates, replicating the basic AMH finding. However, they were also found significantly faster than non-mammals, who were not found faster than inanimates. Two additional experiments were conducted to probe for differences among types of non-mammals using an inattentional blindness task. Experiment 2 (N = 171) compared detection of mammals, insects, and inanimates, and Experiment 3 (N = 174) compared birds and herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians). In Experiment 2, mammals were spontaneously detected at significantly higher rates than insects, who were detected at only slightly higher rates than the inanimates. Furthermore, when participants did not consciously identify the target, they nonetheless could correctly guess the higher level category of the target (living vs. nonliving thing) for the mammals and the inanimates, but could not do so for the insects. We also found in Experiment 3 that reptiles and birds were spontaneously detected at rates similar to the mammals, but like insects they were not identified as living things at rates greater than chance when they were not consciously detected. These results do not support a strong claim that all animates are prioritized in attention, but they do call for a more nuanced view. As such, they open a new window into the nature of animate monitoring, which have implications for theories of its origin.

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It is widely believed that observers can fail to notice clearly visible unattended objects, even if they are moving. Here, we created parametric tasks to test this belief and report the results of three high-powered experiments (total n = 4,493) indicating that this effect is strongly modulated by the speed of the unattended object. Specifically, fast-but not slow-objects are readily noticeable, whether they are attended or not. These results suggest that fast motion serves as a potent exogenous cue that overrides task-focused attention, showing that fast speeds, not long exposure duration or physical salience, strongly diminish inattentional blindness effects.

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People can fail to notice objects and events in their visual environment when their attention is engaged elsewhere. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness, and its consequences can be costly for important real-world decisions. However, not noticing certain visual information could also signal expertise in a domain. In this study, we compared professional fingerprint analysts and novices on a fingerprint matching task in which we covertly placed an image of a gorilla into one of the prints. This gorilla was either small, or large, but always embedded in a way that made it largely irrelevant to the primary task. We found that analysts were more likely than the novices to miss the large gorilla. We interpret this finding not as a flaw in how these experts make decisions, but most likely an expression of their expertise; instead of processing more information they filter out irrelevant information and constrain their attention to what is important.

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OBJECTIVE: An augmented reality head-up display (AR-HUD) is a promising technology in assisted driving. It provides additional information in the driving environment. However, considering the registration problem related to the limitations of interactive technology, we suspect that an AR-HUD may not be able to recognize unpredictable stimuli in a timely manner, inducing inattentional blindness to these non-augmented stimuli. Actually, non-augmented stimuli may accidentally have a brief superimposition to AR graphics. This condition may also influence the rate of inattentional blindness accordingly. Thus, this study examined the problem of inattentional blindness in AR-HUD systems that may result from the immaturity of AR technology. METHOD: We investigated the impact of AR graphic position (peripheral AOI v.s. central AOI) and the relative position of the AR graphic on unpredictable stimuli (on-HUD hazard v.s. off-HUD hazard) on the occurrence of inattentional blindness. Thirty Participants watched an AR-augmented driving video that included four augmented conditions. Participants were instructed to respond to four critical events (speeding, running of red lights, unexpected pedestrians or motorcycles). The rate of inattentional blindness and response time were recorded. We only analyzed data on unexpected pedestrian and motorcycle incidents. RESULTS: The relative position of the AR graphic on unpredictable stimuli and AR graphic positions significantly affected the rate of inattentional blindness and response time. Drivers had a higher rate of inattentional blindness to the unpredictable stimulus briefly superimposed on the AR graphic (i.e., on-HUD hazard) in the peripheral visual field (i.e., peripheral AOI). Also, drivers exhibited a higher rate of inattentional blindness to the unpredictable stimuli outside the AR graphic (i.e., off-HUD hazard) in the central visual field (i.e., central AOI). CONCLUSION: The study is expected to be beneficial for furthering the design of an AR-HUD-assisted system to reduce inattentional blindness in driving. Our results found that in the peripheral visual field, unpredictable stimuli accidentally superimposed on the AR graphic (i.e., on-HUD hazard) lead to a higher probability of ignoring the accidental events and seemed to require a longer response time for drivers. This study illustrated that inattentional blindness to non-augmented stimuli is also influenced by the AR graphic position when AR technology fails to augment them in a timely manner. An important recommendation emerging from this work is to consider the design of AR graphics according to the AR graphic positions and stimulus types to reduce the occurrence of inattentional blindness.

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There is a theoretical debate between the early and late neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). Previous studies using neutral face stimuli supported an early NCC and suggested that visual awareness negativity (VAN) is associated with consciousness, while late positivity (LP) reflects post-perceptual activity. However, emotional faces may help to examine the relationship between LP and consciousness due to the differences in late processing between emotional and neutral faces. To explore the effects of facial emotional information on NCCs, the present study manipulated consciousness with the inattentional blindness paradigm and used happy, fearful, and neutral faces as visual stimuli. The results showed that the conscious processing of emotional faces was correlated with VAN and LP, while the conscious processing of neutral faces was associated with VAN. First, the results suggest that VAN is an NCC, and the relationship between LP and consciousness is affected by facial emotional information. Second, VAN reflects the early perceptual experience of emotional faces, whereas LP may reflect the late conscious processing of emotional faces. Furthermore, source localization analysis showed that the LPs of emotional faces were mainly located in the frontal and parietal lobes, whereas those of neutral faces showed no significant activation. This suggests that facial emotional information may affect the brain regions associated with conscious processing. Time-frequency analysis showed that conscious processing is related to the enhancement of alpha and theta oscillation, indicating that conscious processing may be associated with the suppression of irrelevant stimuli. Overall, the present study suggests that the integration of the theories that support early and late NCCs helps explain the conscious processing of emotional faces.

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Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice an unexpected object in plain sight when attention is otherwise engaged. We investigated what determines observers' attentional set in a dynamic-counting inattentional blindness paradigm, when task instructions and visual distinctiveness of task-relevant objects were either congruent or in opposition. In seven experiments, observers counted bounces by task-relevant objects, with the instruction either to count-by-shape (squares, diamonds, crosses) or count-by-colour (blue, purple). To manipulate visual distinctiveness, we varied the extent to which task-relevant and task-irrelevant objects looked different on two dimensions: shape and colour. When colour better distinguished task-relevant from task-irrelevant objects, observers-even if instructed count-by-shape-reported an unexpected object that matched the colour of task-relevant objects. Crucially, when instructed count-by-colour, but shape better distinguished task-relevant from task-irrelevant objects, observers reported an unexpected object that matched the shape of task-relevant objects. We conclude that observers set their attention to promote efficient task performance.

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