species. They found that when participants were shown an image with a rapidly altering scene where the scene change included an animate or inanimate object that the participants were significantly better at identifying humans and animals. New et al. argue that better performance in detecting animals and humans is not a factor of acquired expertise, rather it is an evolved survival mechanism in human perception. Inattentional blindness is also beneficial as a response to advertising overload. Irrelevant marketing makes it more likely for consumers to ignore initiatives that aim at capturing their attention. This phenomenon called 'purposeful blindness' has a compelling illustration regarding banner ads. Banner blindness shows that consumers can adopt fast and become good at ignoring marketing messages that are not relevant. Broader implications Although the bulk of inattentional blindness research has been conducted in laboratory studies, the phenomenon occurs in a variety of everyday contexts. Depending upon the context, the occurrence of inattentional blindness could range from embarrassing and/or humorous to potentially devastating. Safety Several recent studies of explicit attention capture have found that when observers are focused on some other object or event, they often experience inattentional blindness. This finding has potentially tragic implications for distracted driving. If a person's attention is focused elsewhere while driving, carrying on a conversation or text messaging, for example, they could fail to notice salient and distinctive objects, such as a stop sign, which could lead to serious injury and possibly even death. There have also been heinous incidents attributed to inattentional blindness behind the wheel. For example, a Pennsylvania highway crew accidentally paved over a dead deer that was lying on the road. When questioned regarding their actions, the workers claimed to have never seen it. Many policies are being implemented around the world to decrease the competition for explicit attention capture while operating a vehicle. For example, there are legislative efforts in many countries aimed at banning or restricting the use of cell phones while driving. Research has shown that the use of both hands-free and hand-held cellular devices while driving results in the failure of attention to explicitly capture other salient and distinctive objects, leading to significantly delayed reaction times, as well as inattentional blindness. A study published in 1997, based on accident data in Toronto, found the risk involved in driving while using a cell phone to be similar to that of driving drunk. In both