Executive working memory load induces inattentional blindness

When attention is engaged in a task, unexpected events in the visual scene may go undetected, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). At what stage of information processing must attention be engaged for IB to occur? Although manipulations that tax visuospatial attention can induce IB, the evidence is more equivocal for tasks that engage attention at late, central stages of information processing. Here, we tested whether IB can be specifically induced by central executive processes. An unexpected visual stimulus was presented during the retention interval of a working memory task that involved either simply maintaining verbal material or rearranging the material into alphabetical order. The unexpected stimulus was more likely to be missed during manipulation than during simple maintenance of the verbal information. Thus, the engagement of executive processes impairs the ability to detect unexpected, task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting that IB can result from central, amodal stages of processing.     

Not All Hazards are Created Equal: The Significance of Hazards in Inattentional Blindness for Static Driving Scenes

Explaining how we attend to some objects and not others in real world environments remains a challenge for theories of attention. Driving is an ideal example of this, as it requires a complex synthesis of attentional processing, while still allowing attention to be captured by hazards. In the current study we employed a static inattentional blindness (IB) driving task in which participants were required to make decisions about the content of driving‐related scenarios. In a critical trial, an additional stimulus was added to the driving scenario. All unexpected stimuli were thematically consistent with a normal driving environment but varied in their level of hazard threat. Rates of IB were consistent with the level of hazard threat of the stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of semantic‐based attentional capture in driving, and models of IB.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why does natural scene categorization require little attention? Exploring attentional requirements for natural and synthetic stimuli

It was recently demonstrated that detecting target objects (e.g., animals) in natural scenes can be done in a dual-task paradigm, in the near absence of spatial attention. Under the same conditions, subjects were unable to perform apparently simpler tasks involving synthetic stimuli (e.g., discriminating randomly rotated Ts and Ls, or a bisected colour disc and its mirror image). Classical theories predict that attention is more critical for the recognition of complex stimuli that cannot be easily separated on a single feature dimension. Therefore, these puzzling results have raised a number of questions. If it is not the complexity of a stimulus, what then determines the recognition task's attentional requirements? How does this differ between natural and artificial stimuli? What can these observations tell us about the mechanism of natural scene processing as well as its relation to attention? Here we show that removing colour information, or doubling the amount of information to be analysed, failed to make the natural scene categorization tasks significantly more “attention demanding”. Conversely, increasing discriminability or predictability did not diminish the need for attention in the case of synthetic stimuli. However, when the familiar letters, such as Ts or Ls, were presented upright, full attention was no longer required for discrimination. This suggests that familiarity and meaningfulness might be among the factors that determine attentional requirements for both natural and synthetic stimuli.     

Testing reward-cue attentional salience: Attainment and dynamic changes

A great wealth of studies has investigated the capacity of motivationally relevant stimuli to bias attention, suggesting that reward predicting cues are prioritized even when reward is no longer delivered and when attending to such stimuli is detrimental to reward achievement. Despite multiple procedures have been adopted to unveil the mechanisms whereby reward cues gain attentional salience, some open questions remain. Indeed, mechanisms different from motivation can be responsible for the capture of attention triggered by the reward cue. In addition, we note that at present only a few studies have sought to address whether the cue attractiveness dynamically follows changes in the associated reward value. Investigating how and to what extent the salience of the reward cue is updated when motivation changes, could help shedding light on how reward-cues attain and maintain their capacity to attract attention, and therefore on apparent irrational attentive behaviors.     

Visual distraction increases the detection of an unexpected object in inattentional blindness

Distraction is typically thought to be detrimental to performance and concentration, and stimuli are classified as “distractions” if they take attention away from a primary task. However it has been shown that, under certain circumstances, distractors can also improve task performance. The current study extends this literature by exploring the role of a single discrete transient visual distracting event in increasing attention to an unexpected visual object in an inattentional blindness (IB) paradigm. Experiment 1 investigated the impact of a 48 ms visual distraction stimulus on rates of IB; a second experiment used a shortened, 16 ms visual distracting event. Both the long 48 ms and brief 16 ms distractors significantly reduced overall IB rates, by approximately 50% compared to a no distractor condition. Moreover, this reduction in IB is obtained independent of whether the visual distracting event was noted by the observer. Our findings demonstrate that a single discrete visual distraction can improve the detectability of an unexpected object in an IB task. Implications for theories of distributed attention in such tasks are discussed.     

Visuospatial attention: beyond a spotlight model

Much of the research in visual attention has been driven by the spotlight metaphor. This metaphor has been useful over many years for generating experimental questions in attention research. However, theories and models of visual selection have reached such a level of complexity that debate now centers around more specific questions about the nature of attention. In this review, the general question "Is visual attention like a spotlight?" is broken down into seven specific questions concerning the nature of visual attention, and the evidence relevant to each is examined. The answers to these specific questions provide important clues about why visual selection is necessary and what purpose attention plays in visual cognition.     

On the rationality of pluralistic ignorance

Pluralistic ignorance is a socio-psychological phenomenon that involves a systematic discrepancy between people’s private beliefs and public behavior in certain social contexts. Recently, pluralistic ignorance has gained increased attention in formal and social epistemology. But to get clear on what precisely a formal and social epistemological account of pluralistic ignorance should look like, we need answers to at least the following two questions: What exactly is the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance? And can the phenomenon arise among perfectly rational agents? In this paper, we propose answers to both these questions. First, we characterize different versions of pluralistic ignorance and define the version that we claim most adequately captures the examples cited as paradigmatic cases of pluralistic ignorance in the literature. In doing so, we will stress certain key epistemic and social interactive aspects of the phenomenon. Second, given our characterization of pluralistic ignorance, we argue that the phenomenon can indeed arise in groups of perfectly rational agents. This, in turn, ensures that the tools of formal epistemology can be fully utilized to reason about pluralistic ignorance.     

Moving and looming stimuli capture attention

Attention capture is often operationally defined as speeded search performance when an otherwise nonpredictive stimulus happens to be the target of a visual search. That is, if a stimulus captures attention, it should be searched with priority even when it is irrelevant to the task. Given this definition, only the abrupt appearance of a new object (see, e.g., Jonides & Yantis, 1988) and one type of luminance contrast change (Enns, Austen, Di Lollo, Rauschenberger, & Yantis, 2001) have been shown to strongly capture attention. We show that translating and looming stimuli also capture attention. This phenomenon does not occur for all dynamic events: We also show that receding stimuli do not attract attention. Although the sorts of dynamic events that capture attention do not fit neatly into a single category, we speculate that stimuli that signal potentially behaviorally urgent events are more likely to receive attentional priority.     

The developmental difference of inattentional blindness in 3-to-5-year-old preschoolers and its relationship with fluid intelligence

Preschoolers can focus on the events that they are interested in and shield other information that may still be obvious and important, and this phenomenon is termed as inattentional blindness (IB). The present study investigated the developmental differences in IB and explored its relationship with fluid intelligence in 3-to-5-year-old preschoolers. With the involvement of one hundred and thirty-five preschoolers, it was found that the IB rates decreased with age during 3-to-5-year-olds. Fluid intelligence could significantly predict the incidence of IB in 4-year-olds, which means that those with higher fluid intelligence scores experience less IB. It implied that the ability to detect unintentional stimuli increased from 3-to-5-year-olds, whereas age was an impact factor to the relationship between fluid intelligence and IB.     

Interpersonal influences on goals: Current and future directions for goal contagion research

A growing body of research documents goal contagion, a phenomenon whereby people are likely to catch—to adopt and pursue for themselves—the goals they see others pursuing. Here, I situate goal contagion relative to other ideas about where goals come from and then review existing scholarship on the phenomenon itself and the processes that underlie it. I then point to four larger questions that goal contagion researchers must answer in the years to come. The first two of these questions (what levels of the self‐regulatory hierarchy are subject to contagion and what role goal contagion affords for consciousness and intention) delve deeper into the process of the phenomenon, while the second two (how goal contagion affects social relationships and how it plays into goal pursuit more broadly) highlight how researchers have largely ignored the question of how goal contagion might influence people's broader lives.     

The mere exposure effect for consumer products as a consequence of existing familiarity and controlled exposure

The finding that repeated exposure to a stimulus enhances attitudes directed towards it is a well-established phenomenon. Despite this, the effects of exposure to products are difficult to determine given that they could have previously been exposed to participants any number of times. Furthermore, factors other than simple repeated exposure can influence affective evaluations for stimuli that are meaningful. In our first study, we examined the influence of existing familiarity with common objects and showed that the attractiveness of shapes representing common objects increases with their rated commonness. In our second study, we eliminated the effects of prior exposure by creating fictitious yet plausible products; thus, exposure frequency was under complete experimental control. We also manipulated the attention to be drawn to the products' designs by placing them in contexts where their visual appearance was stressed to be important versus contexts in which it was indicated that little attention had been paid to their design. Following mere exposure, attractiveness ratings increased linearly with exposure frequency, with the slope of the function being steeper for stimuli presented in an inconspicuous context—indicating that individuals engage in more deliberate processing of the stimuli when attention is drawn to their visual appearance.     

意外刺激的意义性及位置对大学生无意视盲的影响

无意视盲是指由于专注于某项任务而对视野中的其他事物视而不见的现象,它同时受意外刺激低水平的物理特性、语义相关性以及观察者自身因素的影响。无意视盲是联系知觉、意识和注意的重要桥梁。本文采用静态的无意视盲范式,随机选取80名在校大学生为被试,同时考察了意外刺激的位置和意义性对无意视盲的影响。结果表明:(1)意外刺激的呈现位置对无意视盲没有显著的影响,呈现在外周和中央的探测率无显著差异。说明无意视盲可能是受基于注意区域而不是基于注视点的位置因素的影响;(2)意外刺激的意义性对无意视盲有显著的影响,相比于无意义刺激,有意义的卡通笑脸不管呈现在中央还是外周,都更易获得探测。     

Distracted by distractors: eye movements in a dynamic inattentional blindness task

Inattentional Blindness (IB) occurs when observers engaged in resource-consuming tasks fail to see unexpected stimuli that appear in their visual field. Eye movements were recorded in a dynamic IB task where participants tracked targets amongst distractors. During the task, an unexpected stimulus crossed the screen for several seconds. Individuals who failed to report the unexpected stimulus were deemed to be IB. Being IB was associated with making more fixations and longer gaze times on distractor stimuli, being less likely to fixate the unexpected stimulus, and having lower working memory capacity than those who were not IB. Noticing the unexpected stimulus was not contingent upon fixating it, suggesting that some individuals processed the unexpected stimulus via covert attention. The findings support earlier research on working memory and IB. In addition, IBs were less efficient attentional allocators than those who were not IB, as reflected in their eye tracking of irrelevant distractors.     

When children ask, "What is it?" what do they want to know about artifacts?

When children ask, "What is it?" are they seeking information about what something is called or what kind of thing it is? To find out, we gave 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (32 at each age) the opportunity to inquire about unfamiliar artifacts. An ambiguous question was answered with a name or with functional information, depending on the group to which the children were assigned. Children were inclined to follow up with additional questions about the object when they had been told its name, but seemed satisfied with the answer when they had been told the object's function. Moreover, children in the name condition tended to substitute questions about function for ambiguous questions over the course of the session. These results indicate that children are motivated to discover what kinds of things novel artifacts are, and that young children, like adults, conceive of artifact kinds in terms of their functions.     

Exploitation and Remedial Duties

The concept of exploitation and potentially exploitative real‐world practices are the subject of increasing philosophical attention. However, while philosophers have extensively debated what exploitation is and what makes it wrong, they have said surprisingly little about what might be required to remediate it. By asking how the consequences of exploitation should be addressed, this article seeks to contribute to filling this gap. We raise two questions. First, what are the victims of exploitation owed by way of remediation? Second, who ought to remediate? Our answers to these questions are connected by the idea that exploitation cannot be fully remediated by redistributing the exploiter's gain in order to repair or compensate the victim's loss. This is because exploitation causes not only distributive but also relational harm. Therefore, redistributive measures are necessary but not sufficient for adequate remediation. Moreover, this relational focus highlights the fact that exploitative real‐world practices commonly involve agents other than the exploiter who stand to benefit from the exploitation. Insofar as these third parties are implicated in the distributive and relational harms caused by exploitation, there is, we argue, good reason to assign part of the burden of remediation to them.     

Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying

Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this light, it comes as a surprise that researchers only recently started to empirically investigate the folk concept of lying. In this paper, we describe three experimental studies which address the following questions: Does a statement need to be objectively false in order to constitute lying? Does lying necessarily include the intention to deceive? Can one lie by omitting relevant facts?

     

Manipulating inattentional blindness within and across sensory modalities

People often fail to consciously perceive visual events that are outside the focus of attention, a phenomenon referred to as inattentional blindness or IB (i.e., Mack & Rock, 1998). Here, we investigated IB for words within and across sensory modalities (visually and auditorily) in order to assess whether dividing attention across different senses has the same consequences as dividing attention within an individual sensory modality. Participants were asked to monitor a rapid stream of pictures or sounds presented concurrently with task-irrelevant words (spoken or written). A word recognition test was used to measure the processing for unattended words compared to word recognition levels after explicitly monitoring the word stream. We were able to produce high levels of IB for visually and auditorily presented words under unimodal conditions (Experiment 1) as well as under crossmodal conditions (Experiment 2). A further manipulation revealed, however, that IB is less prevalent when attention is divided across modalities than within the same modality (Experiment 3). These findings are explained in terms of the attentional load hypothesis and suggest that, contrary to some claims, attention resources are to a certain extent shared across sensory modalities.     

Four Questions of Iterated Grounding

The Question of Iterated Grounding (QIG) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we can distinguish no fewer than four questions lumped under QIG. I will also argue that given some plausible assumptions about what it would take for a relation to back metaphysical explanation, many salient views about grounding allow us to give “easy” answers to these questions—easy in the sense that we can straightforwardly derive them from the respective conception of grounding without getting into the sorts of complexities that typically inform answers to QIG. The paper's main upshot is that we cannot expect to make much progress on QIG without first addressing the difficult issue of how exactly grounding is related to metaphysical explanation.