The Relation Of Neurological Disorder To Inattentional Blindness
This article in summarization states that people who have experienced brain injuries that cause lesions in the parietal cortex (an area of the brain associated with attention) often exhibit what is called unilateral visual neglect, which means that they fail to see objects that are located in the visual field opposite the site of the damaged tissue. That is, for example, if the lesion is on the right, they fail to eat food on the left side of their plates or to shave the left half of their faces. Because these lesions do not cause any sensory deficits, the apparent blindness cannot be attributed to sensory causes and has been explained in terms of the role of the parietal cortex in attentional processing.
Visual neglect therefore seems to share important similarities with IB. Both phenomena are attributed to inattention, and there is evidence that in both visual neglect and IB, unseen stimuli are capable of priming. In IB and visual neglect, the failure to see objects shares a common cause, namely inattention, even though in one case the inattention is produced by brain damage, and in the other the inattention is produced by the task. Thus, evidence of priming by neglected stimuli appears to be additional evidence of the processing and encoding of unattended stimuli.
Results From the United Kingdom Health and Lifestyle SurveyReaction times are strongly associated with age. It is well established that, during adulthood, reaction times increase and become more variable with age. Galton’s own data provided some of the earliest evidence for slowing reaction times. Fozard, Vercruyssen, Reynolds, Hancock, and Quilter (1994) and Deary and Der (2005b) summarized the support from cross-sectional and longitudinal data, respectively. This decline parallels age-related declines in other areas of cognitive functioning. In a meta-analysis of the relationship of age to a range of cognitive measures, Verhaeghen and Salthouse (1997) found a weighted average correlation between age and RT of. 52; they also found that “between 71% and 79% of the age-related variance in the cognitive variables was shared with speed” (p. 246), which included RT. From these and other results, they concluded that “the speed variable may deserve special status in the context of cognitive aging”.
The relationship between reaction time mean and variability, whether represented in the coefficient of variation or in analyses of variability controlling for the mean, also has different age patterning for simple and choice RTs. Sex differences are demonstrated for each of the measures, with the most consistent and robust being that for choice RT variability. This effect remained significant, even in analyses that accounted entirely for age differences. This is a novel finding that awaits a definitive explanation.
