Do individual differences in cognitive ability or personality predict noticing in inattentional blindness tasks?

Abstract People often fail to notice unexpected objects or events when they focus attention on another task or different aspects of a scene. Recently, a number of studies have examined whether individual differences in cognitive abilities or personality can be used to predict who will notice and who will miss unexpected objects. Although such measures can predict performance on deliberate attention tasks where people actively attend to or search for objects, a recent series of meta-analyses (Simons DJ et al. (2024) Psychon. Bull. Rev.31, 1471–1502 (doi:10.3758/s13423-023-02431-x)) showed relatively little evidence that individual differences predict noticing of unexpected objects in inattentional blindness tasks. In part, the evidence is limited and heterogeneous because most studies tested relatively small numbers of participants. This registered report presents the two largest individual difference studies to date, separately measuring cognitive ability (n=1000) and personality (n=1000) predictors that prior evidence suggested might predict inattentional blindness. Collectively, we found evidence that individual differences in some cognitive abilities weakly and inconsistently predicted noticing, but little or no evidence that individual differences in personality predicted noticing. All data and materials for this research are available at https://osf.io/z2fdu.