Abstract
Detecting the unexpected threat-relevant stimuli plays a vital role in preschoolers’ daily life safety, but a few studies have investigated how preschoolers process this kind of stimuli. We applied a classical inattentional blindness task (designed by Mack and Rock Inattentional blindness. MIT Press, 1998) to explore whether threat-relevant stimuli could be better detected in an inattentional condition and whether the age and the fluid intelligence could predict the incidence of the detection. With the involvement of two hundred and thirty-nine preschoolers (aged from 4 to 6 years), we found that it was not more likely for preschoolers to detect the threat-relevant stimuli (Knife and Snake) compared with the non-threat-relevant stimuli (Spoon and Snail). The age difference of detection only occurred in the divided attentional condition, but not in the inattentional condition. Moreover, the group of 5-year-old preschoolers with higher fluid intelligence scores was more likely to detect the unexpected stimuli, but the prediction was not powerful. These findings demonstrate that the threat-superiority effect on IB does not occur on preschoolers and the individual difference of preschoolers’ IB is unstable. This study enriches the cognition of young children’s attentional bias to threat-relevant stimuli, and has certain significance to understand the essence of children’s attentional process.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (the effect of threat stimulus types on children’s inattentional blindness: from behavior to neural mechanism, LQ20C090003). We are grateful to our participants, participants’ parents, the directors, and the teachers in the two kindergartens.
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This study was funded by Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (grant number LQ20C090003).
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Hui Zhang declares that she has no conflict of interest. Jiale Wang declares that she has no conflict of interest. Yan Liu declares that he has no conflict of interest. Congcong Yan declares that she has no conflict of interest. Xiaohong Ye declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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Zhang, H., Wang, J., Liu, Y. et al. Threat-relevant stimuli cannot be better detected by preschoolers in an inattentional blindness task. Psychological Research 86, 823–830 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01530-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01530-5