Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Inattentional blindness, the failure to detect obvious and unexpected events when attention is elsewhere, is consistently underestimated. Instead, people overestimate the ability to notice unexpected events in hindsight. No studies have yet determined whether beliefs about the noticing of unexpected events differ depending on whose visual experience is being evaluated. In the current experiment, one-hundred and forty-eight participants read four vignettes depicting legally-relevant scenarios. Half of participants imagined that they were the individual in the scenario, while the other half imagined that the individual was someone else. Participants rated the likelihood of noticing each unexpected event and their confidence in their judgment. Perspective did not affect likelihood ratings or confidence in isolation, but the effect of perspective on likelihood judgments did depend on the scenario. Additionally, there were differences in likelihood judgments and confidence based on scenario, with participants believing an event would be more likely to be noticed in more relatable legal scenarios (e.g., witness and driving) compared to highly specialized scenarios (e.g., CCTV and medicine). Thus, visual metacognitive judgments do not appear to reliability differ based on the individual being evaluated; instead, features of the scenario may be more important.