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Inattentional Blindness And Office Safety Term Paper

¶ … Inattentional Blindness and Amnesia What was the point of conducting the experiment in the Castel, et al. article?

Despite seeing the workplace fire extinguisher on numerous occasions -- perhaps as often as several times a day -- employees could not recall precisely where it was located, which was the point of this experiment. The fire extinguishers are of course bright red and placed in spots that are easily accessible so that during an emergency they can be quickly located; and yet, because of what the authors called inattentional amnesia, studies show that employees often fail to memorize the location.

Briefly summarize the experience, noting what the researchers did and what they found. The researchers conducted their experiment in the Psychology Department building (Franz Hall tower) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The people in this research included 54 faculty, staff, and students. Among those involved were clearly very intelligent people (20 full-time faculty or "post doctoral fellows"; 24 graduate students; and ten...

The average age of the participants was 34.2 years of age and 52% were females. In this experiment -- which covered floors 3 -- 8 -- every floor had a similar layout and there were six fire extinguishers on each of the six floors. On some of the floors two fire extinguishers were in "plain view from the doorways of offices" (Castel, 1392).
The 54 people on the six floors were asked to participate in a brief survey regarding safety in the building. The question was, did they know (yes or no) the location of the closest fire extinguisher? The follow-up question was, on a scale of 0-10, how confident were they that they knew the exact location of the nearest fire extinguisher (10 was "extremely high confidence"). Following that little quiz, each of the 54 participants were asked to get up and find the nearest fire extinguisher; then they were to record whether they were right or wrong, they were asked (yes or no) if they had noticed it before and were they surprised when they found out that they did or did not know the location. Two…

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Works Cited

Castel, A.D., Vendetti, M., and Holyoak, K.J. (2012). Fire Drill: Inattentional blindness and Amnesia for the location of fire extinguishers. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics.

Vol. 74. 1391-1396.
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