the more likely it is to be perceived, thus reducing the chance of inattentional blindness. Mindfulness A large experiment conducted on 794 participants by Schofield, Creswell and Denson found evidence that completing a brief mindfulness exercise reduced rates on inattentional blindness, but did not improve the depth of encoding of the unexpected distractor. Participants in this experiment engaged in a guided-audio task of mindfully eating a raisin, a well-known task introduced by Kabat-Zinn in his mindfulness-based stress reduction program, or listened to factual descriptions about raisins. The audio recordings used to manipulate mindful states in this experiment are freely available online. Participants who completed the raisin-eating task had 41% greater odds of noticing an unexpected red cross that floated across the screen. Participants were then asked to select the shape that had unexpectedly appeared (i.e., the red cross) out of a line-up of 3 red and 3 green shapes. Those in the mindfulness condition were no better than those in the control condition at selecting the red cross out of the line-up. This was true regardless of whether or not detection of the unexpected distractor was statistically controlled. This experiment demonstrated that not only does mindfulness affect inattentional blindness, but that detailed encoding of the unexpected distractor can be dissociated from the detection of the unexpected distractor. Possible causes The research that has been done on inattentional blindness suggests that there are four possible causes for this phenomenon. These include: conspicuity, mental workload, expectations, and capacity. Conspicuity Conspicuity refers to an object's ability to catch a person's attention. When something is conspicuous it is easily visible. There are two factors which determine conspicuity: sensory conspicuity and cognitive conspicuity. Sensory conspicuity factors are the physical properties an object has. If an item has bright colors, flashing lights, high contrast with environment, or other attention-grabbing physical properties it can attract a person's attention much easier. For example, people tend to notice objects that are bright colors or crazy patterns before they notice other objects. Cognitive conspicuity factors pertain to objects that are familiar to someone. People tend to notice objects faster if they have some meaning to their lives. For example, when a person hears his/her name, their attention is drawn to the person who said it. The cocktail party effect describes the cognitive conspicuity factor as well. When an object isn't conspicuous, it is easier to be inattentionally blind to it.