# Are Familiar Objects More Likely to Be Noticed in an Inattentional Blindness Task?

## TL;DR

The study found that familiar objects are not more likely to be noticed when attention is focused elsewhere, similar to how unexpected sounds are often missed in listening tasks.

## Contribution

The paper provides new empirical evidence that familiarity does not reliably overcome inattentional blindness in visual tasks.

## Key findings

- Participants did not notice their own country's flag or logo more than unfamiliar ones.
- Familiar schematic faces were noticed more than inverted or scrambled ones.
- Highly familiar stimuli do not consistently overcome inattentional blindness.

## Abstract

People often fail to notice the presence of unexpected objects when their attention is engaged elsewhere. In dichotic listening tasks, for example, people often fail to notice unexpected content in the ignored speech stream even though they occasionally do notice highly familiar stimuli like their own name (the “cocktail party” effect). Some of the first studies of inattentional blindness were designed as a visual analog of such dichotic listening studies, but relatively few inattentional blindness studies have examined how familiarity affects noticing. We conducted four preregistered inattentional blindness experiments (total N = 1700) to examine whether people are more likely to notice a familiar unexpected object than an unfamiliar one. Experiment 1 replicated evidence for greater noticing of upright schematic faces than inverted or scrambled ones. Experiments 2–4 tested whether participants from different pairs of countries would be more likely to notice their own nation’s flag or petrol company logo than those of another country. These experiments repeatedly found little or no evidence that familiarity affects noticing rates for unexpected objects. Frequently encountered and highly familiar stimuli do not appear to overcome inattentional blindness.