Previous research has shown that aging increases susceptibility to inattentional blindness (Graham and Burke, Psychol Aging 26:162, 2011) as well as individual differences in cognitive ability related to working memory and executive functions in separate studies. Therefore, the present study was conducted in an attempt to bridge a gap that involved investigating 'age-sensitive' cognitive abilities that may predict inattentional blindness in a sample of older adults. We investigated whether individual differences in general fluid intelligence and speed of processing would predict inattentional blindness in our sample of older adults. Thirty-six healthy older adults took part in the study. Using the inattentional blindness paradigm developed by Most et al. (Psychol Rev 112:217, 2005), we investigated whether rates of inattentional blindness could be predicted by participant's performance on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and a choice-reaction time task. A Mann-Whitney U test revealed that a higher score on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices was significantly associated with lower incidences of inattentional blindness. However, a t test revealed that choice-reaction times were not significantly associated with inattentional blindness. Preliminary results from the present study suggest that individual differences in general fluid intelligence are predictive of inattentional blindness in older adults but not speed of processing. Moreover, our findings are consistent with previous studies that have suggested executive attention control may be the source of these individual differences. These findings also highlight the association between attention and general fluid intelligence and how it may impact environmental awareness. Future research would benefit from repeating these analyses in a larger sample and also including a younger comparison group.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0594-0 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Does familiarity-detection flip attention inward? The familiarity-flip-of-attention account of the primacy effect in memory for repetitions.
Mem Cognit
January 2025
Department of Neurology, University of California Davis, Sacramento, CA, 95816, USA.
In cognitive psychology, research on attention is shifting from focusing primarily on how people orient toward stimuli in the environment toward instead examining how people orient internally toward memory representations. With this new shift the question arises: What factors in the environment send attention inward? A recent proposal is that one factor is cue familiarity-detection (Cleary, Irving & Mills, Cognitive Science, 47, e13274, 2023). Within this theoretical framework, we reinterpret a decades-old empirical pattern-a primacy effect in memory for repetitions-in a novel way.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study examined how young children react to sudden appearances of snakes and lizards by tracking their eye movements and detection rates.
- Involving 137 Chinese children aged five to six, the research used an inattentional blindness paradigm to assess their attentional responses.
- Results showed no significant bias towards snakes over lizards, with children noticing lizards sooner, challenging the idea that humans have an evolved fear of certain ancestral threats.
Echolocating bats can navigate complex 3D environments by integrating prior knowledge of spatial layouts and real-time sensory cues. This study demonstrates that inattentional blindness to sensory information undermines successful navigation in Egyptian fruit bats, , a species that has access to vision and echolocation to traverse natural environments. Bats flew over repeated trials to a perch at a fixed location in the light, allowing them to navigate using both vision and echolocation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReal-world Statistical Regularity Impacts Inattentional Blindness.
Conscious Cogn
October 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, United States.
Does the likelihood of us experiencing inattentional blindness depend on whether the scenes are statistically regular (e.g., probable) or not? Previous studies have shown that observers find it harder to perceive real-world statistical irregularities, such as improbable (statistically irregular) scenes (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen Nurses in an Emergency Situation Look for a Medical Item But Fail to See It.
Inquiry
September 2024
Medical Surgical Nursing Department, College of Nursing, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia.
Emergency department nurses may fail to see medical items in emergency cart drawers, such as syringes and tubes, while handling emergency situations, which can often contribute to a delay in managing the case. This is a phenomenon known as Looked-but-failed-to-see (LBFTS) and occurs when the observer fails to detect a visible visual stimulus among various other stimuli. LBFTS is a group of human errors, including inattentional blindness (IB), satisfaction of search, and biased search processes, and is associated with constraints on human visual processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!