Inattentional Blindness
Failure to notice unexpected stimuli when attention is focused elsewhere.
Also known as: Attention blindness, Perceptual blindness, Invisible gorilla effect
Category: Concepts
Tags: attention, perceptions, cognition, psychology, awareness
Explanation
Inattentional blindness is the phenomenon where people fail to notice unexpected but clearly visible events when their attention is engaged elsewhere. The famous 'invisible gorilla' experiment demonstrated this: viewers counting basketball passes often completely miss a gorilla walking through the scene. This isn't about vision but attention - the information reaches the eyes but isn't consciously processed. Inattentional blindness shows: attention is necessary for awareness, we see far less than we think, and focused attention creates blindness to the unexpected. It has practical implications: distracted drivers miss hazards, focused workers miss important signals, and experts can miss obvious anomalies in their domain. The effect is stronger when: cognitive load is high, unexpected stimuli are dissimilar to attended targets, and we have strong expectations. For knowledge workers, inattentional blindness warns: intense focus creates blind spots, important signals may be missed, and deliberate attention shifts are sometimes necessary.
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