Introduction
Attention is considered an important element of perception, which is also necessary and the concept of inattentional blindness helps in understanding this, which also explains how an individual may miss things despite them being clearly visible.
Explanation of Solution
Answer and explanation
Inattentional blindness is when an individual is unaware of clearly visible stimuli if they are not directing their attention to it. Finch and Lavie (2007) conducted an experiment in which the participants had to see a cross-stimulus presented to them, which was shown for five trials. The observer was asked to indicate which arm of the briefly flashed cross was longer (vertical or horizontal). This task was difficult as the arms of the cross-stimulus were slightly different in length. The cross was flashed rapidly and the longer arm was changed from trial to trial. A small outline was added to the display in the sixth trial. Participants, after the sixth trial, were asked if they had noticed anything they did not see before? According to the results, only 2 out of 20 participants reported to have seen a square. This means the other participants were blind to the square.
Another experiment conducted by Simons and Chabris (1999), called the basketball-passing experiment illustrated how attention affects perception within a dynamic scene where observers were shown a short movie, which had two teams consisting of three players each. One team (white dress) passed the basketball around and the other guarded the first team by following them and putting their arms up just as they do in a game of basketball. The observers' task was to count the number of passes, which meant to focus their attention on the white dress team. Two events took place after 45 minutes in which a woman holding an umbrella or a person in gorilla suit walked through the game (5 seconds). Nearly half of the observers failed to see the woman with the umbrella or the man dressed up as gorilla, according to the results. This showed how attending to one sequence of events could make someone fail at noticing other events, despite those events taking place in front of them.
A similar effort of explaining perception importance in attention was illustrated through the change detection experiment, in which pictures were shown to the participants, which followed another picture, and the task was to determine the difference between them. It was seen that people had difficulty in observing the change even though it was clearly visible.
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