Sustained inattentional blindness does not always decrease with age

Abstract

Children usually miss additional information when they focus on objects or events. This common phenomenon is termed as inattentional blindness. To explore the age-related degree of this phenomenon, we applied a motion task to study the developmental difference of inattentional blindness. A group of 7-to-14-year-old children and adults participated in Experiment 1. The results showed that there was no significant developmental difference in sustained inattentional blindness. Considering that young children's performance on the primary task was poor, we hypothesized that the difficulty of the primary task may contribute to the negative findings. Therefore, we decreased the difficulty of the primary task in Experiment 2. Still, the developmental difference in inattentional blindness rates was absent. Overall, current results implied that the ability of a person to detect an unexpected moving stimuli does not always increase with age. The age-related inattentional blindness seems highly dependent on tasks.