Inattentional Blindness: Reply to Commentaries

each of which has been attributed to inattention, have been vigorously investigated in the last several years. One of the questions that has arisen in connection with all of them is whether they are failures of perception or memory, and this question is raised by Moore in this symposium. In her commentary she argues, in opposition to the claim made in Inattentional Blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998), that the deficit produced by inattention is one of memory and not of perception. However, her argument is not that the failure of memory is one of rapid forgetting of an object that has actually been seen as Wolfe has argued (1999), but rather that the memory failure is one of failing to encode the object in the first place. While it is not clear that it is possible to operationally differentiate between rapid forgetting and a failure to encode (if so, then as has been noted many times before, this would be a difference that makes no difference), the evidence that the critical stimulus in inattention displays which is neither detected, (observers claim to have no awareness even of the presence of anything other than the cross if that happens to be the object of attention), nor can be selected from a very limited array of possible items is capable of priming is powerful evidence against this analysis. Evidence that the critical stimulus primes a subsequent response attests to its encoding. (In fact, priming is the procedure of choice for determining whether a stimulus has been encoded.) Thus it cannot be the case, as Moore is arguing, that inattentional blindness is the consequence of a failure to encode the unattended object. Moreover, evidence of