CAN ATTENTIONAL PATTERNS PREDICT THE FUTURE? A NOVEL VIEW INTO WHO IS LIKELY TO EXPERIENCE CHANGE BLINDNESS

60 pagesPeople witnessing identical streams of information can experience that information very differently. This phenomenon was strikingly documented in a famous psychological experiment: one group of research participants watching a video of a crowded area failed to notice a man in a gorilla suit meander across the room, although another group described the man in the gorilla suit as the most salient aspect of the video. How do we account for such diversity in experience? My research investigates this general question via a new technique: the dwell-time paradigm, in which viewers advance at their own pace through slideshows depicting dynamic events while the time they spend dwelling on each image is measured. We hypothesize that patterns of dwelling across time will clarify which aspects of events viewers are prioritizing in their processing, and thus we will be able to predict – well in advance -- who will subsequently report salient features of interest. Following the completion of two different studies, analysis of the results of this research indicate that dwell-time patterns do in fact provide predictive information about the probability a viewer will be subject to change blindness. This finding has wide reaching implications. Specifically, it will be possible to utilize dwell-time patterns across a range of situations where monitoring the focus and adequacy of people’s attention is crucial. For example, applications could include a) refinements to diagnosis in those with attentional impairments, and b) the creation of systems that alert people when their attentional patterns have become suboptimal for an essential task, such as drivers, train operators, and pilots