Predicting noticing: individual differences in change blindness and inattentional blindness
type: CreativeWork
description: Change blindness and inattentional blindness share commonalities in their phenomenology as failures to notice and in factors that prior research suggests are critical to determining the detectability of visual anomalies. However, few studies explore whether individual performance across these noticing tasks is consistent, whether there are “better noticers” across different scenarios. Here, I compare performance on three noticing tasks: incidental change detection, intentional change detection, and an inattentional blindness task. Participants were reliably faster and more accurate than one another when intentionally searching for change. Individuals who were better at intentionally searching for change were also more likely to notice unexpected changes during a short video clip. They were also somewhat more likely to notice an unexpected object while focusing on an unrelated primary task. Participants also completed a basic attention and personality measures. While attention ability predicts both intentional and incidental change detection, it does not predict inattentional blindness. Personality did not show a clear pattern of relationships with noticing visual anomalies.
abstract: Change blindness and inattentional blindness share commonalities in their phenomenology as failures to notice and in factors that prior research suggests are critical to determining the detectability of visual anomalies. However, few studies explore whether individual performance across these noticing tasks is consistent, whether there are “better noticers” across different scenarios. Here, I compare performance on three noticing tasks: incidental change detection, intentional change detection, and an inattentional blindness task. Participants were reliably faster and more accurate than one another when intentionally searching for change. Individuals who were better at intentionally searching for change were also more likely to notice unexpected changes during a short video clip. They were also somewhat more likely to notice an unexpected object while focusing on an unrelated primary task. Participants also completed a basic attention and personality measures. While attention ability predicts both intentional and incidental change detection, it does not predict inattentional blindness. Personality did not show a clear pattern of relationships with noticing visual anomalies.
author: Jensen, Melinda
language: en
keywords: change blindness, inattentional blindness, individual differences, perception, attention, personality, visual anomalies, noticing
date published: 2012-05-22T00:33:01Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:25:30Z
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/2142/31167