This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness (IB), a failure of conscious awareness in which an observer does not notice an unexpected event because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Previous research using the attentional blink paradigm has indicated that listening to music can reduce failures of conscious awareness. It was proposed that listening to music would decrease IB by reducing observers' frequency of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Observers completed an IB task that varied both visual and auditory demands. Listening to music was associated with significantly lower IB, but only when observers actively attended to the music. Follow-up experiments suggest this was due to the distracting qualities of the audio task. The results also suggest a complex relationship between IB and TUTs: during demanding tasks, as predicted, noticers of the unexpected stimulus reported fewer TUTs than non-noticers. During less demanding tasks, however, noticers reported more TUTs than non-noticers.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 18 March 2026.
All research outputs
#11,900,255
of 34,360,257 outputs
Outputs from Consciousness & Cognition
#951
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Outputs of similar age
#63,502
of 160,842 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Consciousness & Cognition
#12
of 20 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,360,257 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 64th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,880 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 21.2. This one is in the 47th percentile – i.e., 47% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 20 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 40th percentile – i.e., 40% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
