Abstract: When observers are focused on a particular object or event, they often fail to notice salient and distinctive objects, a phenomenon that is termed “inattentional blindness”. Two main experimental paradigms are used in the current research on inattentional blindness—static inattentional blindness and dynamic inattentional blindness. First, this paper analyzes factors that affect inattentional blindness, including sensory conspicuity, social conspicuity, mental workload, attentional set, expectation and capacity; Second, it analyzes cross-modal inattentional blindness; Third, different opinions that exist about inattentional blindness, such as inattentional blindness or inattentional amnesia, all-or-nothing and spectrum are discussed; Finally, this paper explores the relation between implicit attentional capture and explicit attentional capture from the viewpoint of inattentional blindness

Key words: inattentional blindness, attentional capture, attentional set, inattentional amnesia