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Inattentional blindness studies have shown that an unexpected object may go unnoticed if it does not share the property specified in the task instructions. Our aim was to demonstrate that observers develop an attentional set for a property not specified in the task instructions if it allows easier performance of the primary task. Three experiments were conducted using a dynamic selective-looking paradigm. Stimuli comprised four black squares and four white diamonds, so that shape and colour varied together. Task instructions specified shape but observers developed an attentional set for colour, because we made the black-white discrimination easier than the square-diamond discrimination. None of the observers instructed to count bounces by squares reported an unexpected white square, whereas two-thirds of observers instructed to count bounces by diamonds did report the white square. When attentional set departs from task instructions, you may fail to see what you were told to look for.

Original publication

DOI

10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.015

Type

Journal article

Journal

Conscious Cogn

Publication Date

03/2013

Volume

22

Pages

221 - 230

Keywords

Adolescent, Attention, Color Perception, Discrimination (Psychology), Female, Humans, Male, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Statistics, Nonparametric, Visual Perception, Young Adult