The better to see: The role of suppression in inattentional blindness
type: CreativeWork
description: There is a well-documented disconnect between the amount of information we subjectively feel that we have access to and the amount of information our visual system can actually encode, evaluate, and maintain. The former feels immense and effortlessly retrieved; the latter, we know from decades of neural and behavioral work, is quite limited. We preserve a feeling of visual detail and richness in spite of our capacity-limited system by the process of selective attention. We enhance the representation of information to which we attend and inhibit the representation of unwanted information. In so doing, we mitigate the deluge of information coming into the system and dedicate our limited resources to processing only that which we have selected. One of the most remarkable impacts of this deployment of selective attention is the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, in which we fail to detect obvious stimuli or events because our attention is focused on some task. This dissertation describes a series of experiments that use inattentional blindness to explore the impact of suppressing unwanted stimuli and reveal the extensive reach of the inhibitory aspect of selective attention. The series of experiments outlined in Chapter 2 investigated the scope of inhibition and selection by utilizing displays in which one group of objects was homogenous with respect to the task-critical feature, in this case color, while the other group of objects varied either within or across trials. When subjects ignored the heterogeneous objects, they exhibited near-total inattentional blindness for unexpected objects in actively ignored colors, previously ignored colors, and completely novel colors not present in the display at all. When subjects attended to these variable objects, only unexpected objects that matched the attended color on the critical trial attracted notice at any appreciable rate. Suppression acts broadly to inhibit irrelevant information, even if it has not been encountered…
abstract: There is a well-documented disconnect between the amount of information we subjectively feel that we have access to and the amount of information our visual system can actually encode, evaluate, and maintain. The former feels immense and effortlessly retrieved; the latter, we know from decades of neural and behavioral work, is quite limited. We preserve a feeling of visual detail and richness in spite of our capacity-limited system by the process of selective attention. We enhance the representation of information to which we attend and inhibit the representation of unwanted information. In so doing, we mitigate the deluge of information coming into the system and dedicate our limited resources to processing only that which we have selected. One of the most remarkable impacts of this deployment of selective attention is the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, in which we fail to detect obvious stimuli or events because our attention is focused on some task. This dissertation describes a series of experiments that use inattentional blindness to explore the impact of suppressing unwanted stimuli and reveal the extensive reach of the inhibitory aspect of selective attention. The series of experiments outlined in Chapter 2 investigated the scope of inhibition and selection by utilizing displays in which one group of objects was homogenous with respect to the task-critical feature, in this case color, while the other group of objects varied either within or across trials. When subjects ignored the heterogeneous objects, they exhibited near-total inattentional blindness for unexpected objects in actively ignored colors, previously ignored colors, and completely novel colors not present in the display at all. When subjects attended to these variable objects, only unexpected objects that matched the attended color on the critical trial attracted notice at any appreciable rate. Suppression acts broadly to inhibit irrelevant information, even if it has not been encountered…
author: Wood, Katherine
language: en
keywords: inattentional blindness, failures of awareness, attentional suppression, ignoring
date published: 2020-08-26T21:54:30Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:47Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/107924