Exacerbating Perceptual Blindness in an Era of Continual Stimulation From Social Media

Abstract

Perceptual, or inattentional, blindness is the failure to notice a fully visible but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object. This study aims to answer the role of social media in people's lives: broadly, what is its role in influencing attention, and specifically, does spending time on it affect inattentional blindness? Through a series of self-response surveys, we aim to determine what people are processing visually, particularly after spending time on social media, which is rich with pictures, stories, news, and links--all of which, together, can tax cognitive resources. Participants in this study were recruited online using Mechanical Turk to target individuals who used social media. A self-report questionnaire format was used to capture information about the participants’ age, gender, social media usage, and their preferred networks. To determine implicit cognition, participants were asked to perform a specific task by viewing a video, which also contains unexpected stimuli. At the conclusion of the video, they were asked to name any unexpected stimuli that also appeared, to determine their level of inattentional blindness. Findings provide initial evidence that exposure to social media exacerbates inattentional blindness. This study also begins to answer a series of follow-up questions. For instance, now that people are living increasingly more hours on a social media paradigm, how are people's ability to focus getting affected, if at all? And if it is being affected, what's good or bad about that shift?