Beware of the gorilla: Effect of goal priming on inattentional blindness

- We bridged classical attentional blindness and goal priming paradigms.
- Priming a detection-goal improves the detection of an unexpected event.
- Priming the name of the unexpected event do not improve its detection.
- If attentional demands are high, priming do not improve performance.

When people's attention is engaged in a visual task, they often are blind to unexpected events occurring in their environment. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness. In this study, we examine inattentional blindness with regard to goal priming, a technique allowing to unconsciously influence goal pursuit. After being primed with a detection goal, the name of the target to detect, or no prime, participants watched a short sequence in which they had to count passes made by basketball players. An unexpected event occurred during the video. Results indicated that when attentional demands of the monitoring task were moderate, goal priming improved the detection of the unexpected event. Implications for the understanding of nonconscious management of attention will be discussed.