and Consciousness Cognition Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002) 488506
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What we see: Inattention and the capture of attention by meaning
Arien Mack,* Zissis Pappas, Michael Silverman, and Robin Gay
New School University Received 3 July 2002
Abstract Attention is necessary for the conscious perception of any object. Objects not attended to are not seen. What is it that captures attention when we are engaged in some attention-absorbing task? Earlier research has shown that there are only a very few stimuli which have this power and therefore are reliably detected under these conditions (for example, Mack & Rock, 1998; Moray, 1959). The two most reliable are the observers own name and a happy face icon which seem to capture attention by virtue of their meaning. Three experiments are described which explore whether these stimuli are detected under conditions, heretofore unexamined, which either cause inattentional blindness or are associated with a perceptual failure associated with the limits of attention. The evidence obtained indicates that these stimuli have a unique capacity to capture and extend the limits of attention under conditions in which this has been deemed highly unlikely. 2002 Published by Elsevier Science (USA).
1. Introduction We have learned in recent years that there are variety of procedures and conditions that produce inattentional blindness (IB), the failure to see a highly liminal stimulus even imaged on the fovea, which as its name suggests, is a direct
Corresponding author. Psychology Department, New School University, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. E-mail address: [e-mail] (A. Mack). 1053-8100/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Published by Elsevier Science (USA). PII: S 1 0 5 3 - 8 1 0 0 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 2 8 - 4
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A. Mack et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002) 488506
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consequence of inattention. These include the inattention procedure that led to the discovery and naming of the phenomenon itself (Mack & Rock, 1998; Mack, Tang, Tuma, Kahn, & Rock, 1992; Rock, Linnett, Grant, & Mack, 1992) the procedure of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) used to demonstrate and study the attentional blink (AB) (Shapiro, 1994) the rapid scene alternation procedure used to demonstrate and study change blindness (CB) (Rensink, ORegan, & Clark, 1997) and the condition of unilateral visual neglect usually caused by a lesion to the right, posterior parietal cortex (Bisiach, Luzzatti, & Perani, 1979; Rafal, 1998) that leads to a failure to perceive objects in the visual scene opposite the side of the lesion which is attributed to an attention decit (Rafal, 1998). It may also make sense to include metacontrast masking in this list, which at least partially, has been attributed to inattention (Ramachandran & Cobb, 1995; Shelley-Tremblay & Mack, 1999). This masking occurs when the presentation of one stimulus in close spatial and temporal proximity to another eliminates or obscures the rst by co-opting attention. Finally, the phenomenon of stimulus crowding, the failure to identify a peripheral target when it is embedded among distractors, also might be included in this list since it has been attributed to a kind of inattention, namely that produced by the limited resolving power of attention (He, Cavanaugh, & Intrilligator, 1996). All of these failures to see that are so clearly linked to inattention provide ample proof that without attention we are functionally blind. In addition to knowing that inattention leads to functional blindness, we also now know that there are a few stimuli, and probably only a few, capable of capturing attention, and consequently of capturing consciousness, even when they are presented under one or another of the conditions normally associated with inattentional blindness. Perhaps surprisingly, these few stimuli turn out not to be those normally associated with attentional capture in other conditions. While events like abrupt stimulus onsets (Jonides & Yantis, 1988), stimulus motion, or saturated color singletons have been shown to draw attention under conditions of divided attention and to pop out in visual search tasks (see for example, Treisman & Gelade, 1980), they are not detected under conditions of inattention when observers are neither searching for them nor expecting to see them (Mack & Rock, 1998). However, under these very same conditions which routinely produce inattentional blindness (IB), the observers name, a happy face icon, and to a somewhat lesser extent, a stick gure of a person generally are detected. This means that they have the capacity to capture attention. There also is evidence derived from other inattention-related conditions reliably associated with failures to see that at least two of these stimuli, the face and name, are detected under these conditions as well. Specically, there is evidence that ones name modulates the attentional blink (AB) (Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen, 1997a) and that faces are frequently detected in the neglected eld in patients suffering unilateral visual neglect (Vuilleumier, 2000). In addition, both a happy face icon and ones name sharply reduce metacontrast masking by virtue of their capacity to capture attention and ones name even causes signicantly greater masking than a meaningless, scrambled version of the same stimulus (Shelley-Tremblay & Mack, 1999) which, by the way, provides further conrmatory evidence of the role of attention in masking. Finally ones name is one of the rare stimuli that is detected approximately 33% of the time when it is presented in the unat...
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