Processing without noticing in inattentional blindness: A replication of Moore and Egeth (1997) and Mack and Rock (1998)

Abstract

Surreptitious online measures can reveal the processing of stimuli that people do not report noticing or cannot describe. People seem to glean everything from low-level Gestalt grouping information to semantic meaning from unattended and unreported stimuli, and this information seems capable of influencing performance and of priming semantic judgments. Moore and Egeth (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23, 339-352, 1997) provided evidence that judgments about the lengths of two lines were influenced by the grouping of background dots, even when subjects did not notice the pattern the dots formed. Mack and Rock (1998) reported that subjects could be primed to complete a stem with a word to which they were inattentionally blind. In this registered report, we replicated these two classic findings using large online samples (Ns = 260 and 448), finding support for the influence of grouping despite inattentional blindness, but not for word-stem priming.

Keywords: Attention: Divided Attention and Inattention; attention; implicit/explicit memory.