Inattentional Blindness and Office Safety

¶ … 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 staff members as well (Castel, et al., 2012). 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 months later a "surprise follow-up" and participants were asked if they knew the location of the floor plan, the drinking fountain or the clock) (Castel, 1393).

The results of the initial survey showed that only 13 of the 54 people correctly identified the location of the closest fire extinguisher -- that's just 24% of the survey group (Castel, 1393). Eight of the 54 identified a location that was not the nearest one, and the good news was 92% of the 54 survey participants did find a fire extinguisher shortly after leaving their cubicles. About half of the participants did indicate surprise that they hadn't noticed where the extinguishers were previously.

As to the follow up survey, Castel reports that people were "especially good" at identifying the whereabouts of the clock and the drinking fountain -- but they did not seem to know where fire alarm was (1394).

How does the article relate to the slides and did it expand my knowledge of these topics? The article certainly added to the article's narrative and expanded my understanding of attention; for example, one characteristic of attention is "selective," and obviously the UCLA people had a selective attention when it came to location of the fire extinguisher ("we choose what to focus on…"). But.