Effect of Familiarity on Inattentional Blindness

Running head: EFFECT OF FAMILIARITY ON INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS
EFFECT OF FAMILIARITY ON INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS
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1EFFECT OF FAMILIARITY ON INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS
Introduction
Inattentional blindness is a cognitive or sensory phenomenon of human mind that
implies the inability to see or detect any change because of focused attention during
perceiving a sensory experience. In more simple words, when an individual observes an event
through their sensory organs through watching and hearing, the brain automatically focus a
particular zone of the whole event from where the observer wants to receive information. At
the same time, the out of focus zones create blindness, which leaving the observer practically
blind to detect any changes in that blind zones. The inattentional blindness was first observed
by two psychologists named Dr Arean Mack and Dr Irvin Rock during their experiment
regarding the perception and selective attention (Simons & Chabris, 1999). The study says
that because the inability to perceive for selective attention, this sighted blindness it can be
interpreted that the subjects were not attending to the stimulus which was not in centre of
focus but instead were attending to something else, such phenomenon could be labelled by
inattentional blindness (IB),” (Hyman, 2016).
There are many studies conducted to explore the pattern and correlation of different
external stimulus in the ability to detect the change of unexpected object. Amongst those test
the very primitive as well as popular test is gorilla test, which was even utilised in the first
study on inattentional blindness. However, the test process has been also altered by additively
adding some other process of testing the properties of inattention blindness. In this gorilla
test the participants were provided with a task which was to calculating the total number of
passing and bouncing the basket ball while watching a video of some basketball players
playing with a ball and tossing around. In that video at a particular instance a person in a
gorilla costume enters and walks away. Surprisingly, it has been found that more than 70%
was unable to detect the gorilla, which is statistically significant (Kreitz et al., 2015).