Why surprises temporarily blind us

New research from Vanderbilt University is showing that our brains coordinate 2 types of attention and causes us to become temporarily blinded by surprises. This new research was published in Nature Neuroscience on March 7, 2010. It is quoted by Rene Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, that "The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated. We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention." Their research is also based on the interest of finding out what happens to us when our attention is captured by something unexpected. The research team asked individuals to detect the letter " in a stream of letters appearing on a screen, while their brain activity was being watched using functional magnetic resonance imaging. From time to time, an image of a face would interrupt the stream out of nowhere. The surprise caused the subject to completely miss the x the first couple of times. They were eventually able to identify it as successfully as when there was no surprise.


http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2010/03/11/why_surprises_temporarily_blind_us.html