The inattentional gap in task conditioned AI models that omit otherwise reportable safety critical signals

Abstract

AI in radiology and other safety-critical workflows is evaluated on the hazards it is told to find, yet harm arises disproportionately from hazards no one specified. We show that conditioning a language or vision model on a narrow task suppresses its reporting of co-present, safety-critical signals it can otherwise report, a behavioral analogue of human inattentional blindness. Across radiology text scenarios and thoracic-image vision tasks, ordinary focused instructions suppressed reporting by up to 0.92; the gap ranged from minimal to complete across seven models, did not vary monotonically with scale, and persisted in a reasoning model, while one flagship model showed a robust safety-reporting override. We term this dissociation the Inattentional Gap: a system can score near-perfectly on specified hazards while omitting co-present safety-critical hazards. In a 24-scenario probe, an independent open-ended critic restored every omitted finding. We propose reporting-complete evaluation as an admission criterion for safety-critical deployment.

62 pages (31-page article and 31-page supplementary information), 8 figures, 4 tables. v3: corrects the author metadata to the sole author, Kwan Soo Shin; revised title and abstract; adds cross-vendor and flagship validation, signal-detection and specified-task controls, and dual-process probes. Reproducibility deposit: doi:10.5281/zenodo.20826823