Search

Abstract People often fail to notice unexpected stimuli when their attention is directed elsewhere. Most studies of this “inattentional blindness” have been conducted using laboratory tasks with little connection to real-world performance. Medical case reports document examples of missed findings in radiographs and CT images, unintentionally retained guidewires following surgery, and additional conditions being overlooked after making initial diagnoses. These cases suggest that inattentional blindness might contribute to medical errors, but relatively few studies have directly examined inattentional blindness in realistic medical contexts. We review the existing literature, much of which focuses on the use of augmented reality aids or inspection of medical images. Although these studies suggest a role for inattentional blindness in errors, most of the studies do not provide clear evidence that these errors result from inattentional blindness as opposed to other mechanisms. We discuss the design, analysis, and reporting practices that can make the contributions of inattentional blindness unclear, and we describe guidelines for future research in medicine and similar contexts that could provide clearer evidence for the role of inattentional blindness.

People often fail to notice the presence of unexpected objects when their attention is engaged elsewhere. In dichotic listening tasks, for example, people often fail to notice unexpected content in the ignored speech stream even though they occasionally do notice highly familiar stimuli like their own name (the “cocktail party” effect). Some of the first studies of inattentional blindness were designed as a visual analog of such dichotic listening studies, but relatively few inattentional blindness studies have examined how familiarity affects noticing. We conducted four preregistered inattentional blindness experiments (total N = 1700) to examine whether people are more likely to notice a familiar unexpected object than an unfamiliar one. Experiment 1 replicated evidence for greater noticing of upright schematic faces than inverted or scrambled ones. Experiments 2–4 tested whether participants from different pairs of countries would be more likely to notice their own nation’s flag or petrol company logo than those of another country. These experiments repeatedly found little or no evidence that familiarity affects noticing rates for unexpected objects. Frequently encountered and highly familiar stimuli do not appear to overcome inattentional blindness.

The ability to infer the dynamics of physical objects is hypothesized to rely on running simulations of mental models. Here, the authors test this hypothesis by comparing human and monkey behavior to recurrent neural network models in a physical inference task.

The neuronal mechanisms underlying recognition of written letters remain unknown. Here, the authors show that populations of neurons in the ventral visual pathway of macaque monkeys encode orthographic stimuli, indicating that this pathway might be a precursor of orthographic processing abilities.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) remains a serious concern due to its effects on the quality of life of patients and its socioeconomic burden to society. Present day management of PD has limitations in both diagnosis and treatment. Nanotechnology may provide smart solutions to this problem. The present review highlights the recent advancements in the development of nanotechnology platforms for PD. The review focuses on the use of such platforms in diagnostics, treatments, deep brain stimulation, neurosurgery and other modalities of management and the role of nanotechnology in each of these fields. The review also sheds light on the translation of technologies from labs to clinics and the essential advantages as well as concerns that accompany the translation.

To support accurate memory-guided reaching, the brain must represent both the direction and amplitude of reaches in a movement plan. Several cortical areas have been shown to represent the direction of a planned reaching movement, but the neuronal representation of reach amplitude is still unclear, especially in sensory-motor integration areas. To investigate this, we recorded from neurons in the medial intraparietal area (MIP) of monkeys performing a variable amplitude memory reach task. In one monkey, we additionally recorded from the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) for direct cross-area comparisons. In both areas, we found modest but significant proportions of neurons with movement-planning activity sensitive to reach amplitude. However, reach amplitude was under-represented relative to direction in the neuronal population, with approximately one third as many selective neurons. We observed an interaction between neuronal selectivity for amplitude and direction; neurons in both areas exhibited significant modulation of neuronal activity by reach amplitude in some but not all directions. Consistent with an encoding of reach goals as a position in visual space, the response patterns of MIP/PMd neurons were best predicted by 2D Gaussian position encoding model, in contrast to a number of alternative direction and amplitude tuning models. Taken together, these results suggest that amplitude and direction jointly modulate activity in MIP, as in PMd, to form representations of intended reach position.