Inattentional Blindness in Early and Middle Childhood

The study of inattentional blindness, or the failure to notice the appearance of unexpected stimuli in a visual display (Simons & Chabris, 1999), has been largely limited to adult populations. The development of attention and inhibitory control in young children offers an intriguing avenue of study in this field. This paper discusses extant research on both inattentional blindness and attention in early and middle childhood and its implications for possible patterns of inattentional blindness in children. This paper then proposes an experiment designed to determine the degree to which susceptibility to inattentional blindness changes from the end of early childhood and into middle childhood and discusses the potential implications and developmental advantages of a lack of inattentional blindness in young children