Thirty six undergraduate students participated in a study that compared inattentional blindness (IB) with situation awareness (SA), working memory (WM), and driving hazard detection. To test IB, participants watched the Invisible Gorilla video (Simon & Chabris, 1999) of a person dressed in a gorilla costume walking between players passing a basketball. Participants also watched a string of driving videos (automobile and motorcycle) from the driver’s perspective. Participants answered SA questions (relevant to the driving task and irrelevant to the driving task) and identified driving hazards throughout the video. Participants’ SA and hazard detection performance were compared to their IB (did see the gorilla, or did not see the gorilla), and their performance on counting completed basketball passes. In addition, participants’ working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM) were measured. Susceptibility to IB indicated longer response times for irrelevant questions related to the driving task when compared to relevant driving questions. Those who did not see the gorilla (DNS) also took longer to respond to irrelevant questions than those who did see the gorilla (DS). However, the two groups did not differ in the time taken to answer relevant driving SA questions. The DNS group outperformed the DS group on hazard detection performance. Finally, a trend suggested that individuals in the DNS group who had high WM were more accurate in pass counts. Conversely, individuals in the DNS group who had low WM were least accurate in pass counts. (Author/publisher)
Abstract