Manish Verma

2019174
Inattentional Blindness(IB)

Introduction
Although it may seem startling, studies have shown that we seldom see what we are looking
at unless we pay attention to it. It is potentially fatal because life and death issues can be
involved with this phenomenon. Aristotle noted in the early stages of his life that attention
and perception are indistinguishably linked; however, this phenomenon is now popularly
known as inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness. This term describes a
lack/absence of attention that is not related to any mental deficiencies or vision defects. In
addition, it can be defined as the act of overlooking or inability to recognize an unexpected
stimulus that has been right in front of that person's eyes. The temporary blindness effect
can arise when a person can no longer pay attention to all stimuli in any circumstance.
Consequently, that person fails to notice unexpected and sometimes salient objects or
stimuli. Many People get confused between Inattentional Blindness and Inattentional
Amnesia. And it is still contested between both of these whether the observers saw the
stimulus or not, or whether they did see the stimulus but forgot about it shortly thereafter.
We will analyze more about this later.

Review
Researchers have conducted various experiments to understand this phenomenon. In one
experiment, participants were asked to see a video showing two teams carrying out
simultaneous passing of the ball between team members clad in black and white.
Participants are asked to count the number of passes made by the black team. And after the
video was shown, only 21% of the participants reported seeing a man dressed in a gorilla
costume stopped to thump his chest while walking through the court despite having been
clearly visible for 5-9 seconds. Some conclusions have been suggested that some of the
failures to perceive the gorilla may have occurred because they weren't looking directly at
them. Another possibility is the observers missed the gorilla that was right in front of their
eyes because they were so committed to counting ball passes(Arien Mack,2003). But many
researchers find it hard to comprehend how a thumping gorilla would be noticed and
suddenly forgotten in the middle of a ball game. And the evidence that stimuli which are
unnoticed are competent of priming or of influencing an action makes the argument for
inattentional amnesia even more difficult to support because when there is some memory
of the stimulus present, then only can priming occur, even if that memory is non-accessible.

Conclusion
This paper summarizes the meaning of IB, which is having our attention diverted makes us
fail to see highly visible objects that may be directly in front of us. Also analyzed the
difference between IB and inattentional amnesia. Despite the fact that IB has now gained
wide acceptance, many questions about this topic are still unanswered. One unresolved
question is, Is the visual world merely an illusion since people see much less than they
believe they do? The processing of unattended stimuli is one of the most prominent areas of
disagreement among inattentional blindness researchers. In particular, there exists a
conflict on how much exact amount of processing is done on a visual scene before the
selection determines the stimuli that are knowingly perceived and the ones that are not.

References

Mack, A. (2003). Inattentional Blindness: Looking Without Seeing, Page 181

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.01256