Abstract
The question remains as to whether inattentional blindness (IB) persists for repeated presentations and whether scene gist can be processed without attention (Mack & Clarke, 2012). Using the Mack and Rock (1998) IB cross procedure, subjects were tested on 16 trials, 5 containing the same grayscale scene and 11 a mosaic pattern at fixation, along with a cross in the periphery. On every trial, subjects were asked to report the longer arm of the cross. After the 16[sup]th[/sup] trial, which always contained a scene, subjects were asked whether they had been aware of anything other than the cross and the mosaic on any trial. 84% of the subjects were blind even though the scene appeared 5 times. A word stem completion task gave no evidence of semantic priming by scene gist and the critical scenes were not chosen significantly more or less than any others in a forced choice discrimination task. In a second experiment with 90 trials, 60 containing different grayscale scenes and 30 a grayscale mosaic, after reporting the longer arm of the cross, subjects reported as quickly as they could whether a string of letters appearing immediately after the cross and scene or mosaic was a word or non-word. The words were either related or unrelated to scene gist. Response time served as the measure of priming. After the last trial, subjects were asked whether they were aware of anything other than the cross and mosaic. 48% of the subjects reported never seeing the scenes. Significant lexical priming occurred only for subjects who reported seeing the scenes. Across both experiments, there was no evidence of encoding the scene gist of unseen scenes. These results show that IB persists with repeated exposure to foveally presented natural scenes.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013