Space-based Attention and Visual Awareness in Inattentional Blindness Task M Kuvaldina, P Iamshchinina |
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Department of Psychology, St.Petersburg State University, Russian Federation
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| Inattentional blindness (IB) is the inability to notice a salient item while attention is engaged in some other task [Simons, Chabris, 1999, Perception, 28, 1059–1074]. It has been argued that IB effect includes either attention or awareness modulations. To test this we modified a procedure of M. Koivisto [Koivisto, Kainulainen, Revonsuo, 2009, Neuropsychologia, 47, 2891–2899] which allowed to discriminate visual awareness negativity (VAN) and selective attention negativity (SN) and thus to investigate the effect of IB on both electrophysiological correlates. In ERP study subjects were presented with pairs of masked or unmasked Latin letters. The task was to report on the target presence or absence while the subject attended either right or left visual field. When the unmasked target presented in the unattended visual field was missed by the subject, we considered it to be the IB condition. In accordance with Koivisto's results, VAN was observed earlier than SN. VAN was present in both attention conditions suggesting that it is independent from attention shifts. Comparison of IB condition with non-target condition showed posterior negative amplitude shift (VAN) but showed no SN. We conclude that in this task IB is sensitive to awareness modulation but not to attention modulation. This research is a part of our work which is supported by Russian Foundation for Humanities (No12-06-00947/13). |
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