Tests of inattentional blindness (IB) can be viewed as an assessment of one’s ability to divert cognitive resources. IB refers to a phenomenon in which individuals, when observing a visual scene, fail to see an often unexpected, but salient, stimulus even when it appears in the immediate environment. This paradigm was first developed by Mack and Rock (1998) to explore the association between attention and perception. In a typical test of IB, participants are presented with a perceptual discrimination task, for example, they may be asked to compare two arms of a cross on a computer screen. While doing so, an unexpected stimulus appears on the scene for a brief period of time. Observers are then are asked to report whether they had noticed anything other than the stimuli they had been asked to attend to. In a series of studies investigating this phenomenon, Mack and Rock (1998) reported that approximately 40–85% of observers did not detect the presence of an unexpected stimulus at...
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Fieo, R. (2018). Inattentional Blindness. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_9139
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