This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness , a failure of conscious awareness in which an observer does not notice an unexpected event because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Previous research using the attentional blink paradigm has indicated that listening to music can reduce failures of conscious awareness. It was proposed that listening to music would decrease IB by reducing observers’ frequency of task-unrelated thoughts . Observers completed an IB task that varied both visual and auditory demands. Listening (...) to music was associated with significantly lower IB, but only when observers actively attended to the music. Follow-up experiments suggest this was due to the distracting qualities of the audio task. The results also suggest a complex relationship between IB and TUTs: during demanding tasks, as predicted, noticers of the unexpected stimulus reported fewer TUTs than non-noticers. During less demanding tasks, however, noticers reported more TUTs than non-noticers. (shrink)

The perceptual-cognitive ability to track multiple moving objects and its contribution to team sports performance has traditionally been studied in the laboratory under non-sports specific conditions. It is thus questionable whether the measured visual tracking performance and the underlying gaze activity reflected the actual ability of team sports players to track teammates and opponents on a real field. Using a Virtual Reality-based visual tracking task, the ability of participants to track multiple moving virtual players as they would do on a (...) soccer field was observed to pursue two objectives. See the influence of different scenario types on the visual tracking performance of soccer compared to non-soccer players. Observe the influence of spatial features of the simulated situations on gaze activity between soccer players and non-soccer players. The linear mixed model regression revealed a significant main effect of the group but no interaction effect between group and the type of trajectories, suggesting that the visual tracking ability of soccer players did not benefit from their specific knowledge when they faced scenarios with real game trajectories. Virtual players’ spatial dispersion and crowding affected the participants’ gaze activity and their visual tracking performance. Furthermore, the gaze activity of soccer players differed in some aspects from the gaze activity of non-soccer players. Assumptions are formulated as to the implication of these results in the difference in visual tracking performance between soccer players and non-soccer players. Overall, using soccer-specific trajectories might not be enough to replicate the representativeness of the field conditions in the study of visual tracking performance. Multitasking constraints should be considered along with motor-cognitive dual-tasks in future research to develop the representativeness of visual exploration conditions. (shrink)