Moderate movement, more vision: effects of physical exercise on inattentional blindness

Research on inattentional blindness shows that individuals fail to notice unexpected objects or events when attention is focused elsewhere. The majority of previous studies on inattentional blindness have been performed at rest, even though there are several real-life situations that require both physical exercise and focus of attention to accomplish a particular task. A number of different studies have demonstrated that physical exercise influences cognitive performance and attention processes in a variety of ways. Relatively little is known about the effects of physical load on inattentional blindness. The present study was the first attempt to investigate inattentional blindness effects as a function of physical load. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups where they performed two different inattentional blindness tasks: at rest (group 1) and on a bicycle ergometer under moderate (group 2) or high (group 3) physical exercise. The results showed a decrease of inattentional blindness effects from the resting to the moderate exercise condition, and then an increase for the high physical exercise condition, representing an inverted-U plot. Findings support the notion that physical exercise influences individuals' attention performance. We concluded that moderate physical exercise has a positive impact on inattentional blindness, given that people under moderate physical exercise more frequently notice an unexpected object when attention is diverted to another task, and that this evidence should be taken into account when considering certain real-life events.