Inattentional Blindness Versus Inattentional Amnesia for Fixated But Ignored Words

Abstract

People often are unable to report the content of ignored information, but it is unknown whether this reflects a complete failure to perceive it (inattentional blindness) or merely that it is rapidly forgotten (inattentional amnesia). Here functional imaging is used to address this issue by measuring brain activity for unattended words. When attention is fully engaged with other material, the brain no longer differentiates between meaningful words and random letters, even when they are looked at directly. These results demonstrate true inattentional blindness for words and show that visual recognition wholly depends on attention even for highly familiar and meaningful stimuli at the center of gaze.

Attentional disregulation: A benefit for implicit memory.

“…At a peak time of day, young adults showed no implicit memory for the distracting words, even though the words were in the centre of objects they were examining. This finding is consistent with earlier reports of IB in young adults (e.g., Rees et al, 1999) and with the problem solving findings of May (1999).…”

“…Using a modification of Rees et al (1999), participants made same/different judgements on line-drawings superimposed with task-irrelevant letter strings. Memory for the distractors was subsequently tested using an implicit memory task.…”

Neuroimaging Studies of Attention: From Modulation of Sensory Processing to Top-Down Control

“…2 A). In a related study, Rees et al (1999) showed that activations associated with words were not elicited when subjects performed a concurrent, highly demanding object workingmemory task. Thus, like the processing of visual motion, even word processing seems to require attention, contrary to claims for full automaticity (Van Orden et al, 1988;Menard et al, 1996).…”

Specialization within the ventral stream: the case for the visual word form area

“…Second, the VWFA responds more to words or to pseudo-words than to random consonant strings that violate orthographic constraints (Beauregard et al, 1997;Büchel et al, 1998;Cohen et al, 2002;Price et al, 1996;Rees et al, 1999;Xu et al, 2001). 3 This suggests that it has become sensitive to orthographic rules in the subject's language, which are matters of cultural convention.…”