eLife Assessment
This study presents valuable findings to the field interested in inattentional blindness (IB), reporting that participants indicating no awareness of unexpected stimuli through yes/no questions, still show above-chance sensitivity to specific properties of these stimuli through follow-up forced-choice questions (e.g., its color). The results suggest that this is because participants are conservative and biased to report not noticing in IB. The authors conclude that these results provide evidence for residual perceptual awareness of inattentionally blind stimuli and that therefore these findings cast doubt on the claim that awareness requires attention. Although the samples are large and the analysis protocol novel, the evidence supporting this interpretation is still incomplete, because effect sizes are rather small, the experimental design could be improved and alternative explanations have not been ruled out.