Topic > Perceiving Things or Inattentional Blindness

This article describes that our mind does not necessarily perceive things unless it is directed exclusively at them. This is called inattentional blindness (IB), and what it is, is the inability to see highly visible objects that we might be looking at directly when our attention is elsewhere. This raises questions, such as: Is IB a case of rapid forgetting or is it an inability to perceive? A few studies have been conducted to analyze IB, including Haines (1991). Research on pilots. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay As part of this experiment, Haines had experienced pilots who were familiar with flight simulators and proceeded to have them land one plane when there was a second plane blatantly in the way. Surprisingly, none of the pilots noticed the plane until it was too late. Even more alarming, this is not uncommon, but this study helps explain why car accidents are frequent, because the driver is distracted. Similarly, another study, Neisser (1979), had been conducted a few years earlier. Research conducted on a woman holding an umbrella. This experiment consisted of two groups of players on a basketball court. Half of the players wore black uniforms and the other half wore white uniforms. Participants were asked to count how many times the ball was passed, and during this a woman with an umbrella walked into the center of the court and walked back out. Strangely, only 21% reported the presence of women. Later, this study was continued by Simon & Chabris (1999), instead of the woman they changed it, and they had a man wearing a gorilla costume who stopped abruptly in the middle of the field to beat his chest. This experiment also suggested that we generally don't perceive something being there when we're focused on something else. All of these experiments raised confusion about whether or not BI was the same thing as inattentional amnesia. Inattentional amnesia is the inability to create explicit memory. When a subject is asked to remember seeing an object, his or her memory for the stimulus is gone. Furthermore, this controversy had no evidence to support IB and inattentional amnesia is the same thing. Because priming can only occur when there is some memory of the stimulus, even if that memory is inaccessible, which makes BI significantly different from inattentional amnesia. Furthermore, implicit cognition refers to unconscious influences such as knowledge, perception or memory, which influence a person's behavior, even if he or she himself has no conscious awareness of such influences. If stimuli are not seen due to BI they are actually processed but encoded outside of awareness, which establishes that they trigger subsequent behavior. The typical method for documenting implicit perception involves measuring reaction time over multiple trials to obtain data. Additionally, stem completion can be used when the critical stimuli are words. IB experiments using this specific method have illustrated considerable priming ( Mack & Rock, 1998 ), as well as further evidence of the experience of considerable processing of visual information that foregoes attentional capacity. In another study Moore & Egeth (1997), they made the breakthrough of the Muller-Lyle Illusion, which occurs when two lines are perceived as unequal, but in reality they are the same length. This is because one line has fins coming out, which to the naked eye makes it appear longer, and the other line has fins coming in, which to the naked eye makes it appear significantly longer..