Distinct from intelligence or working memory, your “perceptual capacity” predicts how susceptible you are to inattentional blindness (or missing the gorilla in the room)

By Emma Young It’s well-known that we can easily miss objects in our environment that are outside the focus of our conscious attention. “Inattentional blindness” is demonstrated by the famous “invisible gorilla” studies, for example. But there’s a darker side to this phenomenon: if it happens while you’re driving – or if you’re a baggage checker at airport security – the consequences could be fatal. Now a new paper, by Joshua Eayrs and Nilli Lavie at University College London, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, shows that some people can handle more visual information than others before developing this and related kinds of attentional blindness, and this is because they have a greater visual perceptual capacity. “We identified a novel trait that is different from working memory, general intelligence or motivational factors,” Lavie said in a press release.  In initial studies conducted on 279 visitors to the Science Museum in London, Eayrs and Lavie first assessed participants’ perceptual capacity by asking them to rapidly identify the total number of objects in a scene – a so-called “subitizing” task that measures “the simultaneous, parallel processing capacity for detection and individuation of items”. A series of 162 images of between one and nine randomly sized and positioned black squares were presented for 100 milliseconds each. Previous work has found that, on average, people can reliably ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Perception Source Type: blogs