Can You See What I Hear?

Previous research on inattentional blindness (IB) has focused almost entirely on the visual modality. This study extends the paradigm by pairing visual with auditory stimuli. New visual and auditory stimuli were created to investigate the phenomenon of inattention in visual, auditory, and paired modality. The goal of the study was to assess to what extent the pairing of visual and auditory modality fosters the detection of change. Participants watched a video sequence and counted predetermined words in a spoken text. IB and inattentional deafness occurred in about 40% of participants when attention was engaged by this difficult (auditory) counting task. Most importantly, participants detected the changes considerably more often (88%) when the change occurred in both modalities rather than just one. One possible reason for the drastic reduction of IB or deafness in a multimodal context is that discrepancy between expected and encountered course of events proportionally increases across sensory modalities.