Ward Emily J, Scholl Brian J
Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT, 06520-8205, USA,
Psychon Bull Rev. 2015 Jun;22(3):722-7. doi: 10.3758/s13423-014-0745-8.
Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of visual awareness is inattentional blindness (IB), in which a surprisingly salient event right in front of you may go completely unseen when unattended. Does IB reflect a failure of perception, or only of subsequent memory? Previous work has been unable to answer this question, due to a seemingly intractable dilemma: ruling out memory requires immediate perceptual reports, but soliciting such reports fuels an expectation that eliminates IB. Here we introduce a way of evoking repeated IB in the same subjects and the same session: we show that observers fail to report seeing salient events' not only when they have no expectation, but also when they have the wrong expectations about the events nature. This occurs when observers must immediately report seeing anything unexpected, even mid-event. Repeated IB thus demonstrates that IB is aptly named: it reflects a genuine deficit in moment-by-moment conscious perception, rather than a form of inattentional amnesia.
视觉意识中最引人注目的现象或许是无意视盲（IB），即在无人注意时，你眼前一个极其显著的事件可能会完全不被看见。无意视盲反映的是感知失败，还是仅仅是后续记忆的问题呢？由于一个看似难以解决的困境，之前的研究无法回答这个问题：排除记忆需要即时的感知报告，但索要此类报告又会引发一种预期，从而消除无意视盲。在此，我们介绍一种在同一受试者和同一会话中引发反复无意视盲的方法：我们发现，观察者不仅在没有预期时，而且在对事件性质有错误预期时，都无法报告看到显著事件。当观察者必须即时报告看到任何意外情况时，甚至在事件进行过程中，都会出现这种情况。因此，反复出现的无意视盲表明这个名称恰如其分：它反映了瞬间有意识感知方面的真正缺陷，而非一种无意遗忘的形式。
