People sometimes fail to notice salient but unexpected objects when their attention is otherwise occupied, a phenomenon known as Inattentional Blindness. In any given task, some people notice and others miss the unexpected object, but it is unclear whether that pattern reflects any stable individual differences in cognitive ability, with some studies showing a link to working memory capacity and others not. In an initial study, we explored whether the discrepant results derive from the use of different types of inattentional blindness tasks, those that induce failures of awareness due to limited cognitive resources (central tasks) and those that induce failures by diverting attention spatially (peripheral tasks). We used both central and peripheral unexpected stimuli and correlated noticing with multiple measures of working memory, inhibition, and attentional breadth. We expected noticing in central tasks to correlate with measures of working memory and noticing in peripheral tasks to correlate with measures of the breadth of spatial attention. Unexpectedly, measures of both attentional breadth and working memory correlated with performance on the central task but not on the peripheral task.
This study is designed as a replication with more subjects, an additional inattentional blindness task and a few additional interindividual differences measures.