Effects of canonical color, luminance, and orientation on sustained inattentional blindness for scenes

Whether scene gist perception occurs automatically and unconsciously has been the subject of much debate. In addition to demonstrating a new method that adapts the Mack and Rock (1998) inattentional blindness cross procedure to allow for sustained inattentional blindness over a large number of trials, we report evidence from a series of experiments that shows that canonical scene features reduce inattentional blindness to scenes by facilitating the extraction of scene gist. When attentional demands are high, the combination of canonical color, canonical luminance, and canonical orientation reduces rates of inattentional blindness. However, when attentional demands are reduced, canonical features are independently sufficient to facilitate gist extraction and to capture attention. These results demonstrate that canonical color, canonical luminance, and canonical orientation all contribute to scene gist perception, and that when attentional demands are high, only highly canonical stimuli are sufficient to capture attention.