Minds on the blink: The relationship between inattentional blindness and attentional blink

Failures of conscious awareness occur when an observer‘s task demands prevent them from detecting a clearly visible stimulus. Two examples are inattentional blindness (IB), the failure to detect an unexpected stimulus when attention is otherwise engaged, and attentional blink (AB), which describes inability to detect a second target that is presented within 180-500 ms of the first target. Previous research has implicated similar cognitive process in both IB and AB, however they are distinct phenomena and no evidence directly correlated the two. We tested the same group of observers on both an IB task and an AB task. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that ―non-noticers‖ who failed to detect an unexpected stimulus in the IB task also demonstrated a larger AB effect. This suggests that some observers may be more susceptible to failures of conscious awareness generally, regardless of specific context