On Processing in the Inattention Paradigm as Automatic

In the critical trial of the "inattention paradigm" about 25% of the participants did not notice the target stimulus. A significant percent of these "inattentionally blind" subjects did not detect the target objects when explicitly asked about them. Nevertheless, in an implicit test these subjects showed that the target objects were processed. The "inattentionally blind" subjects in the inattention paradigm are blind to the critical stimulus in the same sense that subjects in the Stroop task are blind to the meaning of the presented words. In both cases blindness reflects the limitations of the representations resulting from automatic processing. Therefore, these results are best conceptualized as indicating automatic processing of unattended stimuli.