The Role of Working Memory in "Inattentional Blindness"

This work includes an experimental study of the effect of working memory on the stage of processing visual information using the paradigm of " inattentional blindness". The aim of this project is to investigate the relations between such perceptual process as visual search and the working memory load and to reveal the factors that cause the phenomenon of «inattention blindness». It’s key to find the way how the working memory affects the visual processes. This work presents a review and analysis of available sources on this topic, a description of the methodology and procedure for investigating the visual processing of stimuli at different levels of work memory loading. The study involved a sample of 96 people, who were experimenting with a computer program. The data were statistically processed, as a result of which the influence of the level of loading of working memory on the frequency of manifestation of "blindness by inattention" and the choice of the stage of perceptual processing was not confirmed. The relevance of the work is to study the influence of the level of the object working memory load on selective attention errors, in particular " inattentional blindness ", which helps to expand the research available in this field.