Hangzhou College of Preschool Teacher Education, Zhejiang Normal University, 125 Wener Road, West Lake District, Hangzhou, China.
Zi Jinghua School, Hangzhou, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 May;83(4):1571-1580. doi: 10.3758/s13414-020-02221-w. Epub 2021 Jan 6.
Inattentional blindness (IB) refers to the nature of an individual being unaware of an unexpected stimulus when focusing on an attentional task. Investigation into IB provides an innovative approach for the research of attentional bias that is connected with an individual's immediate attentional capture. This study explored the effect of emotional valence and age of faces on the IB rates of children and adults. We employed a between-subject experimental design with a 2 (age of participants: child, adult) × 2 (age of face: child face, adult face) × 2 (emotional valence: positive, negative) method and used the classic IB task of cross judgment. The participants included 79 adults (54.63 ± 8.192 years old) and 78 children (10.62 ± 2.32 years old). The results showed that: (1) The IB rates of the two groups differed significantly. Children performed better than adults in detecting the faces appearing unexpectedly. (2) The effect of emotional valence only emerged on adult participants' IB. Adults were significantly more likely to detect the positive-emotional faces than the negative-emotional ones. (3) The age of a face was not a significant factor to predict participants' IB. Neither children nor adults showed a preference for the faces of a specific age (e.g., their own age). These findings revealed the distinct characteristics of attentional capture of children and adults when confronting unexpected facial stimuli.
非注意盲视（IB）是指个体在专注于注意力任务时，对意外刺激无意识的一种特性。对 IB 的研究为与个体即时注意力捕获相关的注意力偏差研究提供了一种创新方法。本研究探讨了面部情绪效价和年龄对儿童和成人 IB 率的影响。我们采用了 2（被试年龄：儿童、成人）×2（面部年龄：儿童面部、成人面部）×2（情绪效价：积极、消极）的被试间实验设计，并使用了经典的交叉判断 IB 任务。参与者包括 79 名成年人（54.63±8.192 岁）和 78 名儿童（10.62±2.32 岁）。结果表明：（1）两组的 IB 率差异显著。儿童在检测意外出现的面部时表现优于成人。（2）情绪效价的影响仅出现在成年参与者的 IB 上。成年人更有可能检测到积极情绪的面孔，而不是消极情绪的面孔。（3）面部年龄不是预测参与者 IB 的显著因素。儿童和成人都没有对面部的特定年龄（例如，自己的年龄）表现出偏好。这些发现揭示了儿童和成人在面对意外面部刺激时注意力捕获的明显特征。
