The role of executive functions in young children's static and sustained inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness (IB), which refers to a failure to detect unexpected stimuli in the visual field, is associated with increased risk from undetected threats. While IB has been attributed to several individual factors, the role of cognitive control capacities, such as executive functions, remains unclear. To investigate this relationship, 154 Chinese children aged 3-6 (52.6% male) completed two IB tasks (static and sustained) and three executive function tasks. Findings show that the executive function tasks were predictive of IB, and this prediction varied by IB type: working memory predicted static IB, while cognitive flexibility predicted sustained IB. This underscores the necessity of specifying IB type and the importance of alignment to the cognitive predictors when studying individual differences in IB. When this alignment is achieved, findings suggest that executive function abilities may be differentially implicated in different IB phenomena.