Participants in an experiment are asked to look at pictures of driving scenes taken from the driver's point of view.When the scenes are changed,participants can easily detect some small changes,such as wording on a traffic sign.However,they often miss large irrelevant changes such as a disappearing building.This is because of ____.
A) inattentional blindness
B) divided attention
C) Alzheimer's disease
D) parallel processing

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The phenomenon described in the scenario is known as inattentional blindness, which refers to the failure to notice unexpected visual stimuli when attention is focused on a particular task or object. This can happen even when the stimuli are clearly visible, as in the case of the disappearing building, which participants failed to detect. Divided attention refers to the ability to focus on multiple tasks or stimuli at the same time, which is not relevant in this scenario. Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects memory and cognition, and is not related to the phenomenon described here. Parallel processing refers to the ability of the brain to process multiple streams of information simultaneously, which is not directly related to the failure to detect unexpected visual stimuli, although it may be involved in some way.

Participants in an Experiment Are Asked to Look at Pictures