How memory load leaves us ‘blind’ to new visual information
October 2, 2012
Could trying to remember directions from this GPS display make you temporarily blind? (Credit: Garvin)
Trying to keep an image we’ve just seen in memory can leave us blind to things we are “looking” at, according to a new study by neuroscientists.
It’s been known for some time that when our brains are focused on a task, we can fail to see other things that are in plain sight. It’s called ”inattentional blindness.”
Here’s an example: count the number of basketball passes in this video:
The new results reveal that our visual field does not need to be cluttered with other objects to cause this “blindness” and that focusing on remembering something we have just seen is enough to make us unaware of things that happen around us.
Professor Nilli Lavie from UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who led the study, explains: “An example of where this is relevant in the real world is when people are following directions on a sat nav [GPS receiver] while driving.
“Our research would suggest that focusing on remembering the directions we’ve just seen on the screen means that we’re more likely to fail to observe other hazards around us on the road, for example an approaching motorbike or a pedestrian on a crossing, even though we may be “looking” at where we’re going.”
Participants in the study were given a visual memory task to complete while the researchers looked at the activity in their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The findings revealed that while the participants were occupied with remembering an image they had just been shown, they failed to notice a flash of light that they were asked to detect, even though there was nothing else in their visual field at the time.
The participants could easily detect the flash of light when their mind was not loaded, suggesting that they had established a “load-induced blindness.” At the same time, the team observed that there was reduced activity in the area of the brain that processes incoming visual information — the primary visual cortex.
Load theory
“The ‘blindness’ seems to be caused by a breakdown in visual messages getting to the brain at the earliest stage in the pathway of information flow, which means that while the eyes ‘see’ the object, the brain does not.”
The idea that there is competition in the brain for limited information processing power is known as load theory and was first proposed by Lavie more than a decade ago. The theory explains why the brain fails to detect even conspicuous events in the visual field, like the man in a gorilla suit, when attention is focused on a task that involves a high level of information load.
The research reveals a pathway of competition in the brain between new visual information and our short-term visual memory that was not appreciated before. In other words, the act of remembering something we’ve seen that isn’t currently in our field of vision means that we don’t see what we’re looking at.
The research was supported by the Wellcome Trust.
Comments (3)
by GatorALLin
…so this is why there are so many more traffic accidents when people are texting and proof texting while driving is even more dangerous than we first thought. Note there is no distracted driving laws in Florida. I live in a college town, so when I hop on the Interstate to go up just 1 exit I see at least 65% of the cars I pass either on the cell phone, or texting while driving. I think this problem is getting worse…. and if they keep waiting to add a law there will be so many bad habits already built up. These students are already late to class or distracted… add in texting… = Epic Fail.
by GatorALLin
…. a previous Kurzweil article was just showing a cool google glasses concept to show turn by turn directions in your glasses (or contacts). Maybe these updates prove helpful for walking, but prove deadly for driving? With anything new it will require some real life testing to see what really works, or what is needed. http://www.kurzweilai.net/another-augmented-reality-glasses-design-emerges?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=69fdebd7b6-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email
by Ferenc Kovacs
some pray birds have three focuses in their visual field, one for the background and two “zooms” on the pray selected. Other have a view field of nearly or more than 180 degrees .In any case as we do not have a third eye o the top of our head we always see a 2d plane in focus and change the distance and/or the focus between the object watched and our position. (See also the tau gap). But the consequences for cognition is that we can only represent concepts in 2d planes, as we cannot leave the plane we are in and which we see as flat, straight and horizontal, whereas such properties only exist in relation to our own size – in other scales – there is no such thing as a straight line or two parallel lines. Only the distance measured on the surface of a solid object is tangible and real, the other two distances of the triangulation are “abstracted”, non rational numbers as we cannot do a “precise” division yielding integers.