Driving with satellite navigation contributes to inattentional blindness

Satel­lite Nav­i­ga­tions Could Blind Dri­vers On Road (BioSchol­ar):

“Dri­ving with a satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion can make you blind to pedes­tri­ans, because try­ing to hold an image of the screen in your mind makes you ignore what is in front of your eyes, a new study has revealed. Focus­ing on the detail of some­thing we have just seen diverts our atten­tion away from things hap­pen­ing around us and results in an effect known as “inat­ten­tion­al blindness.”

To Learn More:

• Clas­sic and fun exper­i­ment on inat­ten­tion­al blindness
• Why do You Turn Down the Radio When You’re Lost?
• Increas­ing cog­ni­tive loads on min­ers’ brains: good exam­ple of where soci­ety is heading

Study: Visu­al Short-term Mem­o­ry Load Reduces Retino­topic Cor­tex Response to Con­trast (Jour­nal of Cog­ni­tive Neuroscience)

• Par­tial abstract: Load The­o­ry of atten­tion sug­gests that high per­cep­tu­al load in a task leads to reduced sen­so­ry visu­al cor­tex response to task-unre­lat­ed stim­uli result­ing in “load-induced blindness”…Consideration of the find­ings that visu­al STM (VSTM) involves sen­so­ry recruit­ment with­in Load The­o­ry led us to a new hypoth­e­sis regard­ing the effects of VSTM load on visu­al processing…We test­ed this hypoth­e­sis with fMRI and behav­ioral mea­sures of visu­al detec­tion sen­si­tiv­i­ty… Addi­tion­al visu­al detec­tion exper­i­ments estab­lished a clear trade­off between the amount of infor­ma­tion main­tained in VSTM and detec­tion sensitivity…