Examples Of Inattentional Blindness

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Everybody has probably ever experienced it: you are focusing on one thing and then miss something else completely that is happening at the exact same spot as you were focusing on. The term for this observation is inattentional blindness (IB), which means that you are being blind to something that you are not paying attention to (Mack & Rock, 1998). To study this phenomenon, a person should be given an attention-demanding task and during this task an unexpected stimulus should show up. If this person confirms he or she has not seen the stimulus, IB has occurred (Mack & Rock, 1998). For example, a classic and well-known study about IB showed participants a movie of people playing basketball and asked the participants to count the amount of passes …show more content…

This was a significant, yet very modest, negative correlation which means that people who are very open to new experiences tend to exhibit less IB. Considering that these associations are relatively small and often not found to be significant, it is not very convincing that internal factors, like personality traits, play a big role in the process of IB. However, the focus of research in the field of IB has always been a lot on these internal factors. On the other hand, it is merely examined whether the state someone is in can have influence on the occurring of IB. This is what the present study is aiming to find …show more content…

It has been shown that mindfulness, a method to reduce stress, ensures less IB (Schofield, Creswell & Denson, 2015). Since mindfulness is in contrast with being stressed, we hypothesize the opposite effect of stress on IB in comparison to mindfulness. This would be in line with the finding of stress reducing attention to irrelevant information by Booth and Sharma (2009). Moreover, it has been found that people who are open to new experiences tend to detect unexpected objects more often and are less affected by stress (Kreitz et al., 2015; Williams et al., 2009). Therefore, we hypothesize that people who are not open to new experiences will show more IB. Consequently, we hypothesize that people who are not open to new experiences and are being stressed will show the most