Inattentional blindness in older adults: Effects of attentional set and to-be-ignored distractors

Sally Horwood; Vanessa Beanland

doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1057-4

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Inattentional blindness in older adults: Effects of attentional set and to-be-ignored distractors

Journal article

Peer reviewed

Inattentional blindness in older adults: Effects of attentional set and to-be-ignored distractors

Sally Horwood and Vanessa Beanland

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, Vol.78(3), pp.818-828

2016

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-015-1057-4

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Abstract

Psychology

Cognitive Sciences

aging

visual awareness

divided attention

inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness (IB) involves failing to detect an unexpected visual stimulus while undertaking another task. Previous research has predominantly investigated IB using young adult samples, with few studies exploring whether or how an observer's age affects their detection of unexpected events. To help address this gap, we compared younger adults (18-25 years of age) and older adults (60-80 years of age) on two IB tasks: one dynamic, one static. In the static task, older age was associated with substantially increased IB rates: 89 % for older adults versus 5 % for younger adults. In the dynamic task, we systematically manipulated the presence of to-be-ignored distractors and whether the unexpected stimulus color matched the observers' attentional set. We found a main effect of age on IB: As in the static task, older age was associated with increased IB rates (38 % for older adults vs. 8 % for younger adults). The presence of to-be-ignored distractors and attentional set mismatch interacted to substantially increase IB rates, but age did not interact with either factor. Overall, the results indicate that older age is associated with large increases in IB rates across a range of tasks. The pattern of results is consistent with attentional capacity models of cognitive aging, suggesting that older adults' reduced cognitive resources result in failure to consciously process stimuli that are inconsistent with their attentional set.

Details

Title: Inattentional blindness in older adults: Effects of attentional set and to-be-ignored distractors
Authors: Sally Horwood (Author) - Australian National University
Vanessa Beanland (Author) - Australian National University
Publication details: Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, Vol.78(3), pp.818-828
Publisher: Springer New York LLC
Date published: 2016
DOI: 10.3758/s13414-015-1057-4
ISSN: 1943-3921
Organisation Unit: Centre for Human Factors and Systems Science; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99449121502621
Output Type: Journal article

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Web Of Science research areas: Psychology; Psychology, Experimental