Can the reporting accuracy of a target's qualities be used to predict the reporting accuracy of an unexpected stimulus? **Hypothesis** -------------- Our goal was to force the participant to be focused on a simple task and then surprise them with a new stimulus clearly in the visual field, hoping to elicit an inattentional blink. We then asked them to report specifics about the surprise stimulus to confirm that they had an accurate representation of the object. Our main hypothesis was that those whose attention was more focused on the pre-surprise task would miss an unexpected stimulus (i.e. experience inattentional blindness) more so than those who performed worse on pre-surprise trials. **Methods** ----------- The experiment was ran in a research lab at The Pennsylvania State University as well as at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All those participating in the experiment were students of the respective colleges. Fifty one participants were ran at Penn State and sixty one were ran at the University of Illinois. The experiment was coded and ran entirely using MatLab software, in conjunction with Psychtoolbox and Stream software. The experiment consisted of four practice trials, forty pre-surprise trials, and eighty post-surprise trials. During a normal trial, a colored square was displayed on screen for 200ms, followed by a multi-colored mask for 500ms. Participants were then asked to report the color of the square by clicking on a color wheel. During the surprise trial, a line was displayed at the same time as the colored square. Participants were then asked the following questions and then asked to report the color of the square: 1. What was unusual about that trial? 2. A line was shown. Click where you saw it. 3. Which line angle did you see? For the first question, participants were told to type in a response. The second question had four equally sized square quadrants at the four corners of the screen for participants to select the location of the line. During the third question, participants were presented with eight possible line angles, at the top of the screen and four at the bottom. Participants could then move their mouse to select which line angle they thought they saw. **Results** ----------- Those who performed well in the pre-surprise trials were actually more likely to report an accurate representation of the line than those who performed poorer. These participants also had better color accuracy on post-surprise trials. Although there was a significant difference between participants' color accuracy on "duo" post surprise trials (i.e. when a line and colored square were displayed) than "non-duo" post-surprise trials (i.e. only colored squares displayed), overall color accuracy increased significantly pre- to post-surprise. **Discussion** -------------- We expected to find that those who had a better representation of the target object would have a worse representation of the non-target object, and vice versa. Instead, we found the exact opposite. Those who had a better representation of the target object than others, also had a better representation of the non-target object than others. This suggest a broader attention and memory range than what we hypothesized. It is worth mentioning that since a measure was implemented to promote color accuracy in the form of showing participants how close their reported color was the the actual color displayed, we may have inadvertently diminished individual differences. Participants may have adjusted their responses to achieve a "more correct" response instead of relying on an intrinsic motivation. This problem may be solved by removing the feedback portion of the trial altogether and then measure the speed of trial-completion as a determinant of intrinsic motivation with the hopes that those who complete trials faster would be more susceptible to the effects of inattentional blindness. *References* ------------ Jiang, Y., Olson, I. R., & Chun, M. M. (2000). Organization of visual short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(3), 683-702. Mack, Arien, and Irvin Rock. Inattentional blindness. Vol. 33. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1998. Moore, C., Lleras, A., Grosjean, M., & Marrara, M. (2004). Using inattentional blindness as an operational definition of unattended: The case of a response-end effect. Visual Cognition, 11(6), 705-719. Vogel, E. K., Woodman, G. F., & Luck, S. J. (2001). Storage of features, conjunctions, and objects in visual working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(1), 92-114. Wheeler, M. E., & Treismann, A. M. (2002). Binding in short-term visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131(1), 48-64.