Humans often miss otherwise obvious unexpected events when they are focused on a demanding task. This can occur in the auditory as well as visual domain – inattentional deafness and blindness, respectively. These phenomena can pose a danger in everyday life, such as not noticing a child crossing the street while focusing on other aspects of driving, or missing an alarm. Additionally, the phenomena could have an impact on research, as some manipulations like room acoustics or speaker position did not influence listening effort and memory performance. This thesis tested the hypothesis that the lack of effects could be due to inattentional insensitivity, meaning that participants were so focused on the task that they did not perceive anything else.
A new multimodal paradigm was designed to test inattentional insensitivity in the visual, auditory and audiovisual domain, as well as performance differences between sensory modalities in the task at hand. In a virtual environment, participants performed the paced serial addition test. One third of participants performed the test in the visual domain (PVSAT), one third in the auditory domain (PASAT) and the last third in the audiovisual domain. At some point during the experiment, a wolf or voice, respectively, walked across the VR scene. Participants were questioned about their awareness of the unexpected stimulus afterwards.
Task performance differed significantly between conditions. Participants performed significantly worse in the auditory modality compared to the visual and audiovisual condition. No significant difference was observed between the visual and audiovisual condition. Regarding inattentional insensitivity, 89% of participants did not notice the unexpected stimulus in the visual modality compared to 24% in the auditory modality. In the audiovisual condition, 45% missed the unexpected visual stimulus and 28% missed the unexpected auditory stimulus. Thus, it was validated that the new paradigm can induce inattentional blindness and deafness in all three presentation modalities.

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