A Window of Perception When Diverting Attention? Enhancing Recognition For Explicitly Presented, Unattended, and Irrelevant Visual Stimuli by Target Alignment

Research has demonstrated that irrelevant suprathreshold motion stimuli that are aligned with attended targets in a separate task, fail to illicit inhibitory control in a subsequent motion direction discrimination task (Tsushima, Seitz, & Watanabe, 2008). We extended these findings to conditions involving higher exposure levels to a more salient stimulus (written words) in an inattentional blindness paradigm. Across three experiments, participants were required to respond to immediate picture repetitions in a stream of serially presented line drawings, while at the same time ignore a simultaneously presented stream of superimposed words. Immediately following, a surprise test was given that measured recognition for the unattended words. Words that had appeared simultaneously with a repeated picture in the repetition detection task were not inhibited, but instead recognized significantly more often than words that had appeared with nonrepeating pictures. These findings support the notion that when attention is taxed, recognition for target-aligned task-irrelevant semantic items can be enhanced in a subsequent recognition task. This indicates a learning effect for frequently exposed, high-level irrelevant-stimuli that were temporally aligned with a relevant item in a separate task.