Predicting noticing: individual differences in change blindness and inattentional blindness

Change blindness and inattentional blindness share commonalities in their phenomenology as failures to notice and in factors that prior research suggests are critical to determining the detectability of visual anomalies. However, few studies explore whether individual performance across these noticing tasks is consistent, whether there are “better noticers” across different scenarios. Here, I compare performance on three noticing tasks: incidental change detection, intentional change detection, and an inattentional blindness task. Participants were reliably faster and more accurate than one another when intentionally searching for change. Individuals who were better at intentionally searching for change were also more likely to notice unexpected changes during a short video clip. They were also somewhat more likely to notice an unexpected object while focusing on an unrelated primary task. Participants also completed a basic attention and personality measures. While attention ability predicts both intentional and incidental change detection, it does not predict inattentional blindness. Personality did not show a clear pattern of relationships with noticing visual anomalies