Expectation-based blindness: Predictions about object categories gate awareness of focally attended objects

Selective attention gates access to conscious awareness, resulting in surprising failures to notice clearly visible but unattended objects (“inattentional blindness”). Here, we demonstrate that expectations can have a similar effect, even for fully attended objects (“expectation-based blindness”). In three experiments, participants (N=613) were presented with rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams at fixation and had to identify a target object indicated by a cue. Target category was repeated for the first 19 trials but unexpectedly changed on trial 20. The probability of correct target reports on this surprise trial was substantially lower than on preceding and subsequent trials. This impairment was present for switches between target letters and digits, and also for changes between human and animal face images. In contrast, no drop in accuracy was observed for novel target objects from the same category as previous targets. These results demonstrates that predictions about object categories affect visual awareness. Objects that are task-relevant and focally attended often fail to get noticed when their category changes unexpectedly.