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Change blindness is a surprising perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it.
For example, observers often fail to notice major dierences introduced into an image while it ickers o and on
again.[1] Peoples poor ability to detect changes has been
argued to reect fundamental limitations of human attention. Change blindness has become a highly researched
topic and some have argued that it may have important
practical implications in areas such as eyewitness testimony and distractions while driving.
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Earliest experimental
change blindness
reports
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Research on change blindness developed from investigation in other phenomena such as eye movements and
working memory.[2] Although individuals have a very
good memory as to whether or not they have seen an image, they are generally poor at recalling the smaller details
in that image.[3][4] When we are visually stimulated with
a complex picture, it is more likely that individuals retain
only a gist of an image and not the image in its entirety.
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With the rise of the ability to present complex, realworld images on a computer screen, Dr. George McConkie, in the early 1990s, as part of the new initiatives of the new Beckman Institute for Advanced Sci1
ence and Technology, began a renewed attempt to investigate why the world looked stable and continuous despite
the shifting retinal input signal that accompanied each
saccade.[6][7] This research began when John Grimes and
Dr. George McConkie (1996) began to use actual photographs to study visual stability.[8] This development in
change blindness research was able to show the eects
of change blindness in more realistic settings.[9] Additionally, further research stated that rather large changes
will not be detected when they occur during saccadic
movements of the eye. Another nding based on similar studies stated that a change was easily picked up on
by participants when the eye was xated on the point
of change. Therefore, the eye must be directly xated
on the area of change for it to be noticed. This was
called the saccade target theory of transsaccadic memory
of visual stability.[7][10][6] However, other research in the
mid-1990s has indicated that individuals still have diculty detecting change even when they are directly xated on a particular scene. A study by Rensink, ORegan,
& Clarke demonstrated that change blindness can have
an eect even if the eye was xated on a scene. In this
study, a picture was presented followed by a blank screen
or masking stimulus, which was followed by the initial picture with a change. The masking stimulus almost
acts like a saccadic movement of the eye which makes
it signicantly more dicult for individuals to detect
the change.[9] This was a critical contribution to change
blindness research because it demonstrated that a change
can remain unnoticed with the smallest disruptions.
in change blindness begins even before the change is presented. More specically, there is increased brain activity in the parietal-occipital and occipital regions prior to
the emergence of a change in a change blindness task.[13]
Researchers have also indicated there is a dierence in
brain activity between detecting a change and identifying
change in an image. Detecting a change is associated with
a higher ERP (Event-related potential) whereas identifying change is associated with an increased ERP before
and after the change was presented.[14]
Additional research using uctuations in ERPs (Eventrelated potentials) has observed that changes in pictures (change blindness) are represented in the brain,
even without the perceivers conscious awareness of the
change.[15]
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Another recent study looked at the relation between expertise and change blindness. Physics experts were
more likely to notice a change between two physics problems than novices.[18] It is hypothesized that experts are
better at analyzing problems on a deeper level whereas
novices employ a surface-level analysis. This research
suggests that observing the phenomenon of change blindOther researchers have discovered that mental processing ness may be conditional upon the context of the task.
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Mudsplashes
Choice blindness
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may remain unnoticed.
3.3 Mudsplashes
Mudsplashes are small, high contrast shapes that are
scattered over an image, but do not cover the area of
the picture in which the change occurs. This mudsplash
eect prevents individuals from noticing the change between the two pictures.[11] A practical application of this
paradigm is that dangerous stimuli in a scene may not
be noticed if there are slight obstructions in an individuals visual eld. Previously, it has been stated that humans hold a very good internal representation of visual
stimuli. Studies involving mudsplashes have shown that
change blindness may occur because our internal representations of visual stimuli may be much worse than previous studies have shown.[11] Mudsplashes have not been
used as frequently as the icker or forced choice detection
paradigms in change blindness research, but have yielded
many signicant and groundbreaking results.
4.2
Role of attention
Older individuals have been known to have more diculty detecting changes
Age has been implicated as one of the factors which modulates the severity of change blindness. In a study conducted by Veiel et al. it was found that older individuals
were slower to detect the changes in a change blindness
experiment than were younger individuals.[27] This trend
was also noticed by Caird et al., who found that drivers
aged 65 and older were more prone to making incorrect
decisions after a change blindness paradigm was used at
an intersection, than were participants aged 1864.[28]
5.2 Attention
Attention is another factor that has been implicated in
change blindness. increasing shifts in attention decrease
the severity of change blindness[29] and changes in the
foreground are detected more readily than changes made
to the background of an image, an eect of the intentional
bias for foreground elements.[30]
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Eyewitness testimony
Object presentation
5.4
Substance use
Substance use has been found to aect the detection biases on change detection tasks. If an individual was presented with two changes simultaneously, those that had
a change related to the substance they use regularly reported using the substance more than those detecting the
neutral stimuli. This indicates a relationship between substance use and change detection within a change blindness paradigm.[34] This bias for devoting more attention
to the drug-relevant stimuli is also observed with problem
drinkers. Individuals who have a more severe drinking
problem are quicker to detect changes in alcohol-related
stimuli than in neutral stimuli.[35]
Trac collision
Military
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puter work stations may be extremely benecial to increase the reaction time and accuracy.[41]
REFERENCES
Neuroimaging
Selective attention
Saccade
Salience (neuroscience)
10 References
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8.2
The spotlight eect is a social phenomenon that is dened as an overestimation of the ability of others to notice us.[44] A seemingly obvious change such as another
individual changing a sweater during a memory task is
rarely noticed.[44] However, the individuals switching the
sweater tend to overestimate the ability of the test writers to notice the change in sweaters.[44] In the spotlight
eect, this poor performance is a result of the overestimation of others ability to notice us whereas in change
blindness blindness it is the overestimation of others ability to notice the sweater change. In other words, it is the
distinction between noticing dierences on a person and
noticing dierences between any images.
See also
Attention
Change deafness
Inattentional blindness
Introspection illusion
Memory
Motion blindness
[12] Wilford, M.M. & Wells, G.L. (2010). Does Facial Processing Prioritize Change Detection?: Change Blindness Illustrates Costs and Benets of Holistic Processing. Psychological Science. 21(11). 1611-1615.
doi:10.2307/41062421
[13] Darriba, A., Pazo-Alvarez, P., Capilla, A., & Amenedo,
E. (2012). Oscillatory brain activity in the time frequency
domain associated to change blindness and change detection awareness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
24(2). 337-350. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00073
[14] Busch, N.A, Fruend, I., & Herrmann, C.S. (2010). Electrophysiological evidence for dierent types of change
detection and change blindness. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience. 22(8). 1852-1869. Retrieved from http:
//cognet.mit.edu.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/
[15] Lyyra, P., Wikgren, J., & Astikainen, P. (2010). Eventrelated potentials reveal rapid registration of features of
infrequent changes during change blindness. Behavioral
and Brain Functions. 6(12). 12. doi:10.1186/1744-90816-12
[16] Blagrove, Mark; Wilkinson, Amy (Jun 2010), Lucid
dreaming frequency and change blindness performance,
Dreaming 20 (2): 130135, doi:10.1037/a0019248
[17] Tollner-Burngasser, A., Riley, M.A., & Nelson, W.T.
(2010). Individual and team susceptibility to change
blindness. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine.
81(10). 935-943. doi:10.3357/ASEM.2809.2010
[18] Feil, A., & Mestre, J.P. (2010). Change blindness
as a means of studying expertise in physics. Journal of the Learning Sciences.
19(4).
480-505.
doi:10.1080/10508406.2010.505139
[19] Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikstrm, S., & Olsson, A. (2005).
Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310(5745), 116119.
[20] Hall, L., Johansson, P., Trning, B., Sikstrm, S., & Deutgen, T. (2010). Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition,
117(1), 54-61.
[21] Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Strandberg, T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude
reversals on a self-transforming survey. PloS one, 7(9),
e45457.
[22] Mazza, V., Turatto, M., & Umilt, C. (2005).
Foreground-background segmentation and attention:
A change blindness study. Psychological Research,
69(3), 201-10
[23] Beck, D. M., Rees, G., Frith, C. D., & Lavie, N. (2001).
Neural correlates of change detection and change blindness. Nature Neuroscience, 4(6), 645-650.
[24] Pessoa, L., & Ungerleider, L. G. (2004). Neural correlates
of change detection and change blindness in a working
memory task. Cerebral Cortex, 14(5), 511-520.
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Further reading
EXTERNAL LINKS
12 External links
Examples of change blindness
Ten demos of change blindness at the University of
British Columbia (requires QuickTime)
Demos at the University of Illinois of gradual
changes to scenes and examples of motion-picture
based change detection. Also includes demonstrations of inattentional blindness. (requires QuickTime and some require Java)
Dan Dennett's 2003 talk at TED shows some visual illusions including several striking examples of
change blindness.
Re-creation of Simons & Levin experiment by
British illusionist Derren Brown
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Content license