Intelligence and personality traits do not predict inattentional blindness

A recent study published in Royal Society Open Science examines whether intelligence and personality traits influence the ability to notice unexpected objects while focusing on another task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. The findings suggest that inattentional blindness may be more dependent on the demands and design of a situation than on individual differences.

In the study, led by Daniel J. Simons from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, two large online studies were conducted across multiple countries, involving a total of 2,000 participants. Participants completed three inattentional blindness tasks, including a line judgment task, a shape movement counting task, and a target number search task.

The proportion of participants who noticed the unexpected object varied between 39% and 66% depending on the task. While some cognitive measures were associated with noticing in particular conditions, such as higher scores on reasoning and working memory tests linked to greater noticing in the easier condition, the relationships were small and inconsistent.

Personality measures, such as the Big Five personality traits, absorption, attention-related symptoms, and perfectionism-related characteristics, produced even less evidence of a reliable relationship with noticing inattentional blindness. The authors concluded that individual differences in cognitive abilities weakly and inconsistently predicted noticing, while personality had little or no predictive power.

Limitations include the online format limiting experimental control and the relatively small representation of older adults in the sample.