ISSN : 1226-9654
Choice blindness, the failure to notice mismatches between an intended choice and presented outcome, has mostly been documented in decision-making tasks focusing on preferences, opinions, and facial recognition. To expand upon the existing choice blindness literature, we investigated whether the effect occurs in a non-ambiguous decision-making situation. To test this, we examined if conspicuous mismatches were detected when a simple single feature was manipulated using unidimensional stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with two bars of differing length and were told to choose the longer bar. Afterwards, their selection was presented on screen and participants had to enter how much longer their selection was than the other. In a few trials, however, the relationship between choice and outcome was manipulated and participants received the bar they did not choose. Consistent with previous experiments, only 20% of the manipulations were detected. To make sure participants actually interacted with the stimuli, in Experiment 2, participants had to adjust the length of the chosen bar themselves. While detection rates rose, choice blindness was still existent. Experiment 3 investigated the effect of task-relevancy on choice blindness. Participants were more susceptible to choice blindness when a task-irrelevant feature was swapped rather than a task-relevant feature. The principal finding was that, though all accurately remembered the difference, most were unaware of the mismatch even when the sole feature was manipulated. Also, both task-relevancy and stimulus similarity moderated the effect, hinting that both top-down and bottom-up attention plays a role.
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