Be Prepared: The Effect of Expectations on Inattentional Blindness

Nika Adamian,

Maria Kuvaldina

Published: Sept. 18, 2014

The influence of expectation on inattentional blindness (IB) was investigated using a lexical-based IB task. In two experiments, 235 participants performed word compilations from briefly presented letters and combinations of letters with an unexpected syllable appearing in one of the trials. In Experiment 1, we varied the frequency and grammatical form ofthe presented words, evaluating the role of “general” and “contextual” expectations. The results showed the effect of frequency but not of the grammatical form of the words. Experiment 2 controlled for the role of the state of completion of the word compilation in generating “contextual” expectations. We varied two …