“Sorry mate, I didn’t see you”: perceptual errors and inattentional blindness
“Sorry mate, I didn’t see you”. It’s a common refrain heard after many a road-traffic collision, describing the frequent type of motorbike accident when a car pulls out at an intersection. It turns out that these sorts of events might be more complicated than they first appear. These sorts of situational awareness failures may in fact result from a well-described, but not well-known, psychological phenomenon called inattentional blindness.