Blinded by Irrelevance: Pure Irrelevance Induced “Blindness”:
- To what degree does our representation of the immediate world depend solely on its relevance to what we are currently doing?
- We examined whether relevance per se can cause “blindness,” even when there is no resource limitation.
- In a novel paradigm, people looked at a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring—the task relevance of which was previously manipulated—and were subsequently asked to identify these colors.
Results:
- Whereas knowledge of the task-relevant color was near perfect, up to a quarter of the participants could not name the color of the irrelevant stimulus, even though a control experiment indicated there were sufficient resources to process both stimuli.
- The results are a first demonstration of blindness when mental resources are clearly available and challenge attentional theories predicting strong selection only when resources are taxed.
(Eitam, Yeshurun, & Hassan, 2013). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
