TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of similarity in inattentional blindness
T2 - Selective enhancement, selective suppression, or both?†
AU - Wood, Katherine
AU - Simons, Daniel J.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/11/26
Y1 - 2017/11/26
N2 - When people selectively pay attention to one set of objects and ignore another, unexpected stimuli often go unnoticed. Noticing rates are higher when the unexpected object matches the features of the attended items and lower when it matches those of the ignored items. No prior studies have fully disentangled these aspects of similarity; in previous work, the unexpected object fell on a continuum between the attended and ignored objects, so increasing the similarity to one set of objects necessarily decreased it to the other. We designed an inattentional blindness task in which we held similarity to the attended set constant and varied it with respect only to the ignored set, or vice versa. In Experiment 1, objects that were more similar to the attended set were noticed more often and objects that were more similar to the ignored set were noticed less often. Experiment 2, using a different set of unexpected objects, replicated the result that similarity to the ignored set affected noticing, but showed no effect of similarity to the attended set. In both experiments, the pattern of noticing rates differed for similarity with respect to the attended and ignored items, suggesting that suppression of ignored objects functions independently of enhancement of attended objects.
AB - When people selectively pay attention to one set of objects and ignore another, unexpected stimuli often go unnoticed. Noticing rates are higher when the unexpected object matches the features of the attended items and lower when it matches those of the ignored items. No prior studies have fully disentangled these aspects of similarity; in previous work, the unexpected object fell on a continuum between the attended and ignored objects, so increasing the similarity to one set of objects necessarily decreased it to the other. We designed an inattentional blindness task in which we held similarity to the attended set constant and varied it with respect only to the ignored set, or vice versa. In Experiment 1, objects that were more similar to the attended set were noticed more often and objects that were more similar to the ignored set were noticed less often. Experiment 2, using a different set of unexpected objects, replicated the result that similarity to the ignored set affected noticing, but showed no effect of similarity to the attended set. In both experiments, the pattern of noticing rates differed for similarity with respect to the attended and ignored items, suggesting that suppression of ignored objects functions independently of enhancement of attended objects.
KW - Inattentional blindness
KW - attentional selection
KW - similarity
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U2 - 10.1080/13506285.2017.1365791
DO - 10.1080/13506285.2017.1365791
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85031127861
SN - 1350-6285
VL - 25
SP - 972
EP - 980
JO - Visual Cognition
JF - Visual Cognition
IS - 9-10
ER -