Unattended stimuli often go completely unseen even when physically present

Evidence

Berkeley researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock coined the term in the 1990s while studying the drastic difference in our ability to perceive something if it lies outside our field of visual attention. In a simple experiment, they asked subjects to look at a cross on the screen and try to determine whether any of the lines were longer than the other. But this was a made-up task to distract subjects from the actual experiment. While the subjects were staring at the cross, a small stimulus would flash somewhere on the screen. When the stimulus fell inside the circular area circumscribing the cross lines, the subjects were much more likely to see it. “In short, when the inattention stimulus falls outside the area to which attention is paid, it is much less likely to capture attention and be seen,” the researchers write. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 391

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines inattentional blindness concretely through the Mack and Rock cross experiment.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own sustained project on attention as world-constitution — this is the evidence base for the ‘key through the gate’ model Odell later builds her argument on. — connects to: An inserted black body makes invisible whiteness and its amnesiac temporality visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 519