Several studies have been conducted on the phenomenon known as inattentive blindness (IB). Although these studies do provide information that is generalizable between different situations, it leaves some important questions unanswered. Therefore, this research study sought to answer these questions: the suspicion that there is no difference in the similarity of the stimuli used in these experiments, task difficulty and its role in identifying the presence of stimuli, and comparisons between previously performed versions.
Four videos of two teams, one black and the other white, playing a basketball tossing game were created prior to the conducting of this study. One of two different stimuli was placed in each video. One stimulus was a woman …show more content…
In all, 54% of participants saw the stimuli compared to the 46% that did not see it. Most participants were able to identify the presence of the stimuli in the opaque (33%) and easy conditions (64%) compared to the transparent (42%) and hard conditions (45%). The transparent condition was found to be most difficult in conjunction with the hard task condition, suggesting that watching events that are hard to see or even difficult while performing the hard condition task. Participants reported being able to see the woman with the umbrella more than seeing the gorilla, however when participants were asked to observe the black team, they more often reported seeing the gorilla. This suggests that observers notice stimuli possessing similar features as the object they are watching. It was suggested that participants who lost track of the passes their team could have possibly noticed the stimuli more often, however, this is not the case as they were changed before the analysis of the data and when determining the presence of a correlation of all of the conditions excluding the condition of opaque with the easy task and the woman with the umbrella as the stimulus, a correlation of r= 0.15 was found. This concluded that inattentive counting is not associated with noticing the stimulus. Results from this study showed to be conclusive with previous research in this field and was able to
Four videos of two teams, one black and the other white, playing a basketball tossing game were created prior to the conducting of this study. One of two different stimuli was placed in each video. One stimulus was a woman …show more content…
In all, 54% of participants saw the stimuli compared to the 46% that did not see it. Most participants were able to identify the presence of the stimuli in the opaque (33%) and easy conditions (64%) compared to the transparent (42%) and hard conditions (45%). The transparent condition was found to be most difficult in conjunction with the hard task condition, suggesting that watching events that are hard to see or even difficult while performing the hard condition task. Participants reported being able to see the woman with the umbrella more than seeing the gorilla, however when participants were asked to observe the black team, they more often reported seeing the gorilla. This suggests that observers notice stimuli possessing similar features as the object they are watching. It was suggested that participants who lost track of the passes their team could have possibly noticed the stimuli more often, however, this is not the case as they were changed before the analysis of the data and when determining the presence of a correlation of all of the conditions excluding the condition of opaque with the easy task and the woman with the umbrella as the stimulus, a correlation of r= 0.15 was found. This concluded that inattentive counting is not associated with noticing the stimulus. Results from this study showed to be conclusive with previous research in this field and was able to