Stability and variability in perceptual cognition and visual noticing

Why do we notice one thing but not another? Why does one person see something that another does not? Change blindness describes a common failure to notice discontinuities across some disruption. Inattentional blindness describes a failure to notice information while observers are focused on other information. This dissertation summarizes research on both phenomena and on cognitive task performance, identifying variability between individuals in performance across tasks by alternating between literature reviews, descriptive analyses of two multivariate datasets, and theoretical discussion. More specifically, Chapter One reviews the paradigmatic context of change blindness and inattentional blindness as was first published in Jensen, Yao, Street, & Simons (2012). Chapter Two describes theory and evidence of attention-based individual differences in change blindness and inattentional blindness and concludes by discussing a contemporary visual noticing framework and its implications for individual difference predictions. The third chapter describes methods and task-level results from a new individual differences study with multiple estimates of visual noticing, cognitive task performance, and personality. Then, Chapter Four builds on previous visual noticing findings by describing consistencies observed in this new dataset across tasks, across analyses, and across studies. Although visual noticing under some conditions (like intentional change detection) correlated with cognitive task measures, noticing during unexpected single trial scenarios was often more strongly related to personality differences. In neither case were other measures strongly predictive of noticing. The implications of these visual noticing findings are discussed at the end of Chapter Four (and are revisited in Chapter Seven). Chapter Five provides an extended analysis of intentional change detection performance that examines consistency in intentional change detection across tasks, variability in accuracy and search times to find a change across trials of a flicker search task, and then describes response time differences and variability across prompts throughout the study. For each analysis, the observed data patterns are discussed in the context of relevant research and theoretical frameworks. Chapter Six provides an analysis of variability within individuals' performance across three sessions of cognitive task data collected by Lee et al. (2012). Intraindividual variability in performance, overall performance, and performance changes across the three sessions are discussed. Finally, Chapter Seven discusses implications of observed variability in noticing and cognitive task performance for perception, attention, and cognition.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Jensen, Melinda

Contributors dc:contributor

• Simons, Daniel J.
• Beck, Diane M.
• Fabiani, Monica
• Kramer, Arthur F.
• Lleras, Alejandro

• change blindness
• inattentional blindness
• individual differences
• attention
• personality
• visual noticing
• intra-individual variability
• cognition
• cognitive task performance
• perception

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Melinda Jensen. Portions of this dissertation have been published elsewhere: Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/72959

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/72959