Tissue identification and histological study, preparation of samples and responsibility for the "blindness" in the study, commissioning to external laboratories of additional analysis, the coordination of the work among all authors, and the drafting of the manuscript was done by PM.
Although the percentage of blindness was only 4.7% in this study, the overall impact could be greater than what we perceive at this point.
Most officers who experienced inattentional blindness in our study were surprised that they could have missed the gun like other participants in inattentional blindness studies, they expected that they would automatically notice something salient and relevant (Levin & Angelone, 2008).
AMD, sequelae of retinal vein occlusion, retinal detachment and macular scar were the major causes of blindness in our study.
21 However, smoking was not associated with an increased risk of blindness in our study, which is consistent with other research.
Findings of inattentional blindness in studies using this procedure remain open to alternative accounts in terms of memory failures or intention rather than attention (Braun & Sagi, 1990; Wolfe, 1999).
In this study almost 75% of blindness was avoidable.
In this study, the cause of blindness was recorded for each eye, which would increase the proportion of disorders with a bilateral tendency such as AMD, MMD and glaucoma as the cause of blindness.
Noticing rates might differ if the gun were kept in a more typical location, but using a more typical location would have made studying inattentional blindness in this context impossible most people who carry a gun in their car keep it hidden (e.g., in the glove box).
All the affected patients in this study began suffering from severe night blindness before the age of ten.
