Now or never: noticing occurs early in sustained inattentional blindness

The visible gorilla: Unexpected fast-not physically salient-Objects are noticeable

It is widely believed that observers can fail to notice clearly visible unattended objects, even if they are moving. Here, we created parametric tasks to test this belief and report the results of three high-powered experiments (total n = 4,493) indicating that this effect is strongly modulated by the speed of the unattended object. Specifically, fast-but not slow-objects are readily noticeable, whether they are attended or not. These results suggest that fast motion serves as a potent exogenous cue that overrides task-focused attention, showing that fast speeds, not long exposure duration or physical salience, strongly diminish inattentional blindness effects.

Learning Cognitive Skills by Playing Video Games at Home: Testing the Specific Transfer of General Skills Theory

Can people learn cognitive skills by playing video games at home? In the present study, college students took a pretest consisting of four cognitive tasks and 2 weeks later took a posttest consisting of the same four tasks (i.e., n-back and letter-number tasks tapping executive function skills and mental rotation and multiple object tracking tasks tapping perceptual processing skills). During the 2-week period, students engaged in no game activity, or played designed video games (targeting executive function skills) or an action video game (targeting perceptual processing skills) at home for 6 30-min sessions. The two game groups did not show greater gains than the control group on any of the tasks overall, but the designed game group outperformed the control group on the difficult trials of the n-back task and the action game group outperformed the control group on the difficult trials of the mental rotation tasks. Results provide partial evidence for the specific transfer of general skills theory, and show that the training effects of game playing are focused on skills that are exercised in the game.

Inattentional blindness in anesthesiology: A gorilla is worth one thousand words

INTRODUCTION

People are not able to anticipate unexpected events. Inattentional blindness is demonstrated to happen not only in naïve observers engaged in an unfamiliar task but also in field experts with years of training. Anaesthesia is the perfect example of a discipline which requires a high level of attention and our aim was to evaluate if inattentional blindness can affect anesthesiologists during their daily activities.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

An online survey was distributed on Facebook between May 1, 2021 and May 31, 2021. The survey consisted of five simulated cases with questions investigating the anesthetic management of day-case surgeries. Each case had an introduction, a chest radiography, an electrocardiogram, preoperative blood testing and the last case had a gorilla embedded in the chest radiography.

RESULTS

In total 699 respondents from 17 different countries were finally included in the analysis. The main outcome was to assess the incidence of inattentional blindness. Only 34 (4.9%) respondents were able to spot the gorilla. No differences were found between anesthesiologists or residents, private or public hospitals, or between medical doctors with different experience.

DISCUSSION

Our findings assess that inattentional blindness is common in anesthesia, and ever-growing attention is deemed necessary to improve patient safety; to achieve this objective several strategies should be adopted such as an increased use of standardized protocols, promoting automation based strategies to reduce human error when performing repetitive tasks and discouraging evaluation of multiple consecutive patients in the same work shifts independently of the associated complexity.