Pure Irrelevance Induced 'Blindness'

OBSERVATION Blinded by Irrelevance: Pure Irrelevance Induced “Blindness”

To what degree does our representation of the immediate world depend solely on its relevance to what we are currently doing? We examined whether relevance per se can cause “blindness,” even when there is no resource limitation. In a novel paradigm, people looked at a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring—the task relevance of which was previously manipulated—and were subsequen...

A case of 'pure' word blindness.

The concept of 'pure' word blindness is still a matter of controversy. Some authors maintain that it is a selective asymbolia (Holmes, 1950; Symonds, 1953; Brain, 1955) while others (Critchley, 1953) consider it to be an aphasic disorder. Beringer and Stein (1930) attribute its mechanism to some pathological functional lability of the visual system. Martin (1954) assumes that it is due to visua...

2156 Cancer-induced blindness

Load Induced Blindness

Although the perceptual load theory of attention has stimulated a great deal of research, evidence for the role of perceptual load in determining perception has typically relied on indirect measures that infer perception from distractor effects on reaction times or neural activity (see N. Lavie, 2005, for a review). Here we varied the level of perceptual load in a letter-search task and assesse...

Attention induced motion blindness

Recent studies have shown evidence for modulation of cortical activity by attention in visual areas involved in motion processing. Behavioural effects of this modulation have only been reported for high-order, but not for luminance-based motion. We show that attentional load can even affect the perception of a first-order motion inducing a short-termed motion blindness. The detection of transie...