Causes Of Change Blindness

The human brain is capable of perceiving and interpreting information or stimuli received through the sense organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) (Weiten, 1998). This ability to perceive and interpret stimulus allows the human being to make meaningful sense of the world and environment around them. However, even as the human being is able to perceive and interpret stimuli information through all sense organs, stimuli is most often or primarily interpreted using the visual (eyes) and auditory (ears) sense organs (Anderson, 2009). However, for the purpose of this paper, the visual information process will be examined.

In the novel The Invisible Gorilla: How our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, a deeper way of how the mind works is shown. The authors explain what they call the “illusion of attention” by providing experiments and illustrations. The message being passed is that we as humans might think we are always aware of our surroundings, but we actually miss what is right in front of us. People usually focus on one thing at a time, therefore the unexpected goes unnoticed. The book explains how the brain only focuses on the object or area you are concentrating on, making you “blind” to everything else. Many experiments were held to prove to the readers that our intuition deceives us.

According to research, the earliest experimental change blindness is developed from the phenomena such as eye movements and more on working memory. It depends on the personal attention to the images they perceive (MacWhinney, 2001). Although individual have well informed and good memory on whether or not they have perceived an image, they also have poor recalling ability especially on the smaller details that are presented in that image. This is evidently through presentation of the complex pictures that are stimulated

Change blindness is a phenomenon in attention where drastic changes to a scene can go unnoticed. This is important to the field of Human Sensation and Perception because it helps illustrate how a visual scene is processed. Specifically it shows how even if there is direct attention to a scene, there are times when drastic changes can occur without perception of the change occurring. With extensive research already conducted illustrating this effect, new research has recently been conducted studying different types of scene changes in the hopes of understanding which changes are easier or harder to notice. The results of these studies were quantified by the measurement of change detection time (usually reported in seconds). This subset of change blindness research has far-reaching practical applications, especially in the field of security and law enforcement. By applying the knowledge of which type of stimuli lead to longer change detection times training programs could be developed that allow this population to improve their observation skills.

Change blindness is the incapacity to detect changes to a visual scene. Over the past decade, many researchers (Simons & Levin, 1997; Simons & Rensink, 2005) have studied and reviewed this phenomena among several experiments. Notably, these studies have given contribution to understand perception, attention, and awareness.

In Dretske's paper over "what change blindness teaches about consciousness," I think one of the most important ideas pointed out is that what is in question is not what the person thinks they saw or were aware of, but what they actually were aware of. This is really hard to test and get results on accurately.

One example mentioned was that on movies or tv shows people are more focused on the big picture and forget the little details that are in front of them. Another example that was given was when watching a movie for the first time our brains only recollects the important information, but if one watches with detail they can see that in the same scene objects and people stay the same or change. This is called change blindness, not many people can see or find the change difference until someone lets them know what changed. There are lots of reports that lack recognition of strangers changing identity, but people can’t seem to notice the blind change. People were showed a video of a robbery and in the middle of the clip the robber was changed into a whole different person and only certain people noticed the change, while the rest said nothing and pointed to picture of the first robber when they were told to identify the individual. Which led to the eyewitnesses being unreliable when it came to the robber, making errors identifying them (Davies, Hine,

One failure of awareness that seems to have a connection with traffic accidents is change blindness. Rensink (2002) proposed that change blindness occurs when a change within the scene goes unnoticed, due to the inability or difficulty to detect it. Resink (2002) also explained that change blindness can take place during a disruption in vision, such as an eye- movement or a blink.

The first thing I learned is about change blindness. In change blindness we do not notice big changes that occur. This helps me understand that my brain is concentrating at one task at a time. For example, the video shows this by demonstrating that we only focused on the money that the man had, which caused us not to see the change in the background.

One of the examples that I found to be interesting, that relate to access consciousness, which was discovered in psychology, state that people can miss obvious items in the space that are right in front of their faces. The experiment is as follows; people will count how many passes between the white-shirted members of a basketball team and ignore the black-shirted members. Furthermore, the passers will be moving fast in between the basketball team, which will be a demanding task to process. Some might say that it's easy, but here's the catch, will they observe an individual wearing a gorilla suit walking across a basketball court. Well, a very high percentage out of a same one state that they did not notice a man wearing a gorilla suit

The human brain has a limited capacity to deal with the incoming information but yet every moment we encounter a large variety of stimuli like sights, sounds and smells. However, as mentioned above if we encounter stimuli which conflict with our schemas, we reconstruct our memory in order to fit our schemas. The human brain therefore focuses on some aspects of the situation while ignoring the others in order to cope with the sensory barrage. This process of choosing stimuli is called selective attention. Eyewitnesses tend to collect information that relates to their interests and may ignore other vital aspects

I found chapter 4, Bounded awareness interesting because it brings to light the apparent choice people make to focus primarily on what they want to see. I think the PowerPoint presentation summarized it best; Bounded awareness is “In-attentional blindness to obvious information. 2.The failure to notice obvious changes in one’s environment. The tendency to focus on only a part of the problem at hand”. For example, I think the puzzle in the text of 9 dots illustrates this perfectly. I fell victim to this exact dilemma. I tried to stay within the boundaries of the nine dots and made the choice to place a boundary within the dots that did not exist nor was directed.

New research has been done in as to why innatetional blindness occurs, there has been various studies done on the topic after having noticed that certain obvious stimuli are undetectable even though they are completely obvious. Research demonstrates that people are able to detect these “obvious” stimuli only when they are within the range of attention. It is also demonstrated that participants are able to notice these stimuli by knowing ahead of time that they will appear, making them be more on the look out. Reasons as to why people are usually unable to notice these stimuli is because they are told to focus solemnly on one thing, leaving to select their attention on that one object, ignoring everything else. It was demonstrated that the

Blindsight phenomenon suggests that the brain can sense the presence of an object without actually seeing it. Blindsight is defined as those who are cortically blind (caused most often by blood flow loss to the occipital cortex, where we process our conscious visuals) due to lesions in their striate cortex, or V1, having the ability to respond to visual stimuli that is not consciously seen. Patients reportedly have blindness, but respond to visual stimuli. The studies are mainly conducted on patients who are "blind" on only one side of their visual field. The articles I have had assistance in choosing are; Seeing without Seeing? Degraded Conscious Vision in a Blindsight Patient and Unseen Facial and Bodily Expressions Trigger Fast Emotional