Inattentional blindness has been found connected to the high number of motorcycle-related traffic accidents, according to three human factors and ergonomics researchers. They suggested that there's a link between the traffic accidents and human brain processes, which led to the "looked but failed to see errors."
In traffic accidents, people usually report that they failed to see the other vehicle, even if they looked towards that direction with enough time to avoid it. These driving errors are called looked but failed to see errors and very common in road accidents, making up about 50 percent of vehicle collisions. According to the Association for Safe International Road Travel, almost 1.3 million of people die in road crashes each year.…show more content… Studies in 1999 and 2000 suggested that a failure in memory may cause the phenomenon. When the unexpected stimuli happened, the mind may not create a long-lasting memory of the even leading to inattentional amnesia.
3. In 1998 and 2001, some research suggested that the lack of expectation towards the unattended stimuli may lead to the phenomenon. If the person has been made aware of the upcoming event, the phenomenon disappears and replaced by expectation.
4. A study in 2005 suggested that the perceptual cycle may affect the occurrence of the phenomenon. The perceptual cycle is a framework for attention capture and awareness capture happening at two different stages of processing. Inattentional blindness happens when an interaction exists between the person's attention and prominence of the unexpected stimuli.
Pammer and co-authors Stephanie Sabadas and Stephanie Lentern at ANU encourage drivers to pay attention to motorcycles as well.
"Motorcycles appear to be very low on the priority list for the brain when it is filtering information. By putting motorcyclists higher on the brain ‘radar’ of the driver, hopefully, drivers will be more likely to see them. In the meantime, we need to be more vigilant, more active, and more conscious when driving," said