Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness

We designed a magic trick that could be used to investigate how misdirection can prevent people from perceiving a visually salient event, thus offering a novel paradigm to examine inattentional blindness. We demonstrate that participants’ verbal reports reflect what they saw rather than inferences about how they thought the trick was done and thus provide a reliable index of conscious perception. Eye movements revealed that for a subset of participants their conscious perception was not related to where they were looking at the time of the event and thus demonstrate how overt and covert attention can be spatially dissociated. However, detection of the event resulted in rapid shifts of eye movements towards the detected event, thus indicating a strong temporal link between overt and covert attention, and that covert attention can be allocated at least 2 or 3 saccade targets ahead of where people are fixating.

[1]  D. Simons,et al.  Change Blindness in the Absence of a Visual Disruption , 2000, Perception.

[2]  M. Land.  Eye movements and the control of actions in everyday life , 2006, Progress in Retinal and Eye Research.

[3]  Ronald A. Rensink,et al.  TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE: The Need for Attention to Perceive Changes in Scenes , 1997 .

[4]  B. Dosher,et al.  The role of attention in the programming of saccades , 1995, Vision Research.

[5]  Ronald A. Rensink,et al.  Towards a science of magic , 2008, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[6]  G. Rizzolatti,et al.  Reorienting attention across the horizontal and vertical meridians: Evidence in favor of a premotor theory of attention , 1987, Neuropsychologia.

[7]  Katherine M. Armstrong,et al.  Visual and oculomotor selection: links, causes and implications for spatial attention , 2006, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[8]  J. Henderson.  Visual Attention and Eye Movement Control During Reading and Picture Viewing , 1992 .

[9]  J. Henderson.  Human gaze control during real-world scene perception , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[10]  Michael F. Land,et al.  There's more to magic than meets the eye , 2006, Current Biology.

[11]  J. Wolfe.  Inattentional Amnesia , 2000 .

[12]  John M. Findlay,et al.  Misdirection in magic: Implications for the relationship between eye gaze and attention , 2008 .

[13]  M. Posner,et al.  Orienting of Attention* , 1980, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[14]  J. Henderson,et al.  The Role of Fixation Position in Detecting Scene Changes Across Saccades , 1999 .

[15]  H. Deubel,et al.  Saccade target selection and object recognition: Evidence for a common attentional mechanism , 1996, Vision Research.

[16]  Daniel Memmert,et al.  The effects of eye movements, age, and expertise on inattentional blindness , 2006, Consciousness and Cognition.

[17]  Steven B. Most,et al.  What you see is what you set: sustained inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness. , 2005, Psychological review.

[18]  S. Martinez-Conde,et al.  Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research , 2008, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[19]  Daniel J. Simons,et al.  Inattentional blindness , 2007, Scholarpedia.

[20]  P. Perona,et al.  Rapid natural scene categorization in the near absence of attention , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[21]  C. Chabris,et al.  Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events , 1999, Perception.

[22]  G. Kuhn,et al.  Magic and Fixation: Now You Don't See it, Now You Do , 2005, Perception.

[23]  C. Koch,et al.  Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[24]  John M. Findlay,et al.  Covert Attention and Saccadic Eye Movements , 2005 .

[25]  T. Schenk,et al.  Reflexive attention attenuates change blindness (but only briefly) , 2008, Perception & psychophysics.

[26]  S. Langton,et al.  Gaze Cues Influence the Allocation of Attention in Natural Scene Viewing , 2006, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[27]  Peter U. Tse,et al.  Mapping visual attention with change blindness: new directions for a new method , 2004, Cogn. Sci..

[28]  R. Klein,et al.  Does Oculomotor Readiness Mediate Cognitive Control of Visual-Attention - Revisited , 1994 .

[29]  J. Theeuwes,et al.  Parallel allocation of attention prior to the execution of saccade sequences. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[30]  Yiannis Aloimonos,et al.  Active vision , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[31]  Ronald A. Rensink.  The Dynamic Representation of Scenes , 2000 .

[32]  M. Corbetta,et al.  A Common Network of Functional Areas for Attention and Eye Movements , 1998, Neuron.

[33]  K. Rayner,et al.  Covert visual attention and extrafoveal information use during object identification , 1989, Perception & psychophysics.

[34]  Gustav Kuhn,et al.  DON'T LOOK NOW: THE MAGIC OF MISDIRECTION , 2007 .

[35]  Erik D. Reichle,et al.  Toward a model of eye movement control in reading. , 1998, Psychological review.