A new study published in Royal Society Open Science suggests intelligence and personality traits do little to predict whether people notice an unexpected object while concentrating on another task. Led by Daniel J. Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the researchers conducted two large online studies across multiple countries, each including 1,000 participants in the final analyses, to test whether cognitive ability or personality sways noticing.
Inattentional blindness is the phenomenon at the heart of the research. It occurs when individuals fail to see something clearly visible because their attention is fixed on a different task. For example, a person counting ball passes in a video might miss an unusual figure moving through the scene. The failure is not necessarily a reflection of eyesight or intelligence but rather a limitation of attention and the brain’s prioritisation of task-relevant information.
Earlier work in the field asked whether some people are consistently better at spotting unexpected events. Potential predictors have included intelligence, working memory and personality traits such as openness or absorption, yet many studies used small samples and reached inconsistent conclusions.
The new project aimed to provide a stronger test of these ideas. The researchers ran two large online studies across several countries, with the cognitive ability study comprising 1,000 participants and the personality study also recruiting 1,000 participants for final analyses.
Participants completed three inattentional blindness tasks. In one, they judged line lengths while an unexpected shape briefly appeared. In another, they counted the movements of shapes as an unexpected object travelled through the display. In the third, they searched for a target number among symbols while another object appeared in the scene.
Those in the cognitive ability study completed tests of visual reasoning and working memory, while those in the personality study completed measures of the Big Five traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness), along with absorption, ADHD-related attention symptoms and perfectionism-related characteristics.
The proportion of participants who noticed the unexpected object varied between 39% and 66%, depending on the task. In the counting task, about 45% noticed the unexpected object in both the easier and more difficult conditions, a result that did not reproduce the common finding that a harder main task reduces noticing.
Participants who noticed an unexpected object in one task were slightly more likely to notice one in another, but the relationship was weak, suggesting only a small tendency for some people to notice more often without indicating a strong, stable “noticer” personality.
Some cognitive measures showed associations with noticing in particular conditions. For example, higher scores on certain reasoning and working memory tests were linked with slightly greater noticing in the easier condition, but these relationships were small and inconsistent. A measure that predicted more noticing in one condition sometimes predicted less in another.
Personality produced even less evidence of a reliable relationship. None of the personality measures consistently predicted noticing, and when the researchers combined the full set of cognitive or personality measures, the models explained very little of the differences between participants.
The authors concluded: “Collectively, we found evidence that individual differences in some cognitive abilities weakly and inconsistently predicted noticing, but little or no evidence that individual differences in personality predicted noticing.”
Several limitations are noted. The online format limited experimental control, and the sample included relatively few older adults. Also, noticing an unexpected object is difficult to measure repeatedly because participants may remember the task and deliberately search for the object in subsequent rounds.
The study, “Do individual differences in cognitive ability or personality predict noticing in inattentional blindness tasks?”, was authored by Daniel J. Simons, Yifan Ding, Connor M. Hults and Brent W. Roberts.
