Inattentional blindness

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Chapter 4 endnote 17, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

The brain’s second alternative [for resolving prediction error] is to be stubborn and stick with the original prediction. It filters the sensory input so it’s consistent with the prediction. In this situation, I could be standing in a baseball field but daydreaming (predicting and simulating) as the ball sails toward me. Even though the ball is fully within my visual field, I don’t notice it until it thumps at my feet. Another example would be the food-filled diapers at my daughter’s disgusting foods birthday party: our guests’ prediction of a baby poo aroma dominated their actual sensory input of mashed carrots.

Another example might be inattentional blindness. A normally functioning brain not only anticipates upcoming sensory input, but it also predicts whether prediction errors are just noise that can safely be ignored or whether they are meaningful and therefore should be encoded and remembered (i.e., learned).[1][2][3][4]


Notes on the Notes

  1. Gottlieb, Jacqueline. 2012. "Attention, learning, and the value of information." Neuron 76 (2): 281–295.
  2. Behrens, Timothy EJ, Mark W. Woolrich, Mark E. Walton, and Matthew FS Rushworth. 2007. "Learning the value of information in an uncertain world." Nature Neuroscience 10 (9): 1214-1221.
  3. Moran, Rosalyn J., Pablo Campo, Mkael Symmonds, Klaas E. Stephan, Raymond J. Dolan, and Karl J. Friston. 2013. "Free energy, precision and learning: the role of cholinergic neuromodulation." The Journal of Neuroscience 33 (19): 8227-8236.    
  4. Feldman, Harriet, and Karl Friston. 2010. "Attention, uncertainty, and free-energy." Frontiers of Human Neuroscience 4 (215): 1-23.