Apples to Oranges

Abstract

Inattentional blindness research suggests that individuals are not “blind” to unexpected events; instead, unexpected information is perceived and processed, and can reach attention, based on the information contained within these events. Factors that have been shown to influence further processing and subsequent attention include luminance (Most, Simons, Scholl, and Chabris, 2000) and color (Welk, Creager, and Gillan, 2014). The current research examined how semantic content of unexpected events influenced the processing of these events in an inattentional dual task. Participants performed a dynamic, computer-based visual task, in which unexpected events occasionally occurred; semantic relevance of these unexpected events was manipulated across trials. Results indicated that the degree of semantic relatedness of unexpected events did not significantly affect primary task performance or the detection of unexpected events. This suggests that semantic content is processed differently from perceptual content in a visual inattention task. The authors propose that the processing of semantic information in visual inattention tasks may be analogous to the processing that takes place in dichotic listening tasks; specifically that the processing of semantic content may be more dependent on the availability of attentional resources than perceptual content. Future directions are discussed.