Introduction
Attention is a complicated concept that refers to what information in our environment is processed. According to many psychologists, objects in the world are only processed if our attention is focused there, meaning many objects can be missed. One phenomenon that explains why we ‘miss’ certain objects is due to inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is where attention is focused on a certain task and unexpected objects that appear in our visual field may not be noticed due to our attention being elsewhere. Inattentional blindness can be observed when participants are asked to pay attention to one task and an unexpected object is placed into their field of vision whilst completing the task, if they do not see this object …show more content…
The experiment had an independent groups design and the students were randomly assigned to one of the two groups. Group A contained 138 students who completed an easy task and group B contained 145 students who completed a harder version of the task. All participants were shown two 10 second videos, the videos showed 5 black objects and 1 white object moving around randomly in a box. All the objects bounced off the boarders of the box and participants had to watch how many times the white object bounced off the boarders. Group A had to count how many times the white object bounced off the boarders in total whereas group B had to count how many time the white object bounced off the boarders both horizontally and vertically. All participants watched the same two videos. The first video was there to familiarise the participants with the task and so no unexpected objects appeared in the video. However, the second video was the same as the first, but after 3 seconds a monkey entered the box and moved across the screen from right to left. The monkey appeared on the screen for 4 seconds. After the participants watched both videos, we asked them three
Attention is a complicated concept that refers to what information in our environment is processed. According to many psychologists, objects in the world are only processed if our attention is focused there, meaning many objects can be missed. One phenomenon that explains why we ‘miss’ certain objects is due to inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is where attention is focused on a certain task and unexpected objects that appear in our visual field may not be noticed due to our attention being elsewhere. Inattentional blindness can be observed when participants are asked to pay attention to one task and an unexpected object is placed into their field of vision whilst completing the task, if they do not see this object …show more content…
The experiment had an independent groups design and the students were randomly assigned to one of the two groups. Group A contained 138 students who completed an easy task and group B contained 145 students who completed a harder version of the task. All participants were shown two 10 second videos, the videos showed 5 black objects and 1 white object moving around randomly in a box. All the objects bounced off the boarders of the box and participants had to watch how many times the white object bounced off the boarders. Group A had to count how many times the white object bounced off the boarders in total whereas group B had to count how many time the white object bounced off the boarders both horizontally and vertically. All participants watched the same two videos. The first video was there to familiarise the participants with the task and so no unexpected objects appeared in the video. However, the second video was the same as the first, but after 3 seconds a monkey entered the box and moved across the screen from right to left. The monkey appeared on the screen for 4 seconds. After the participants watched both videos, we asked them three