Inattentional Blindness in 9- to 10-Year-Old Intellectually Gifted Children

Abstract

Researchers suggest that while intellectually gifted children might not always display adequate focus on their general life, they perform very well on experimental attentional tasks. The current study used inattentional blindness (IB) paradigm to understand better the attentional abilities of intellectually gifted children. Specifically, we examined whether intellectually gifted children were more able to avoid IB while performing well on certain attentional tasks. An experiment was carried out that involved 44 intellectually gifted and 45 average children. Results showed that intellectually gifted children, whose IB rate was 18.6%, were less susceptible to IB than average children, whose IB rate was 46.5%, χ²(1) = 7.626, p = .006. Intellectually gifted children performed better on the primary attentional tasks than average children when unexpected stimuli occurred. Findings suggest that intellectually gifted children are more likely to maintain attention on current task but are more prone to process additional stimuli. Overall, the present study argues that general intelligence may affect IB.