Change Blindness Essay

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.

Gibson’s and Gregory’s theories of perception both suggest that eye-retina is important for perception. The both believe that without eye-retina, a person will not be able to see. This is a common view of both of the theories of perception. The idea is supported by the case of SB. SB was a man who had been blind from birth due to cataracts. When he was 52, he had an operation which restored his sight and hence he could see. Thus, this case has shown the importance of eye-retina for things to be perceived. And therefore, supports both of theories of perception which eye-retina is essential for perception.

The purpose of the study was to measure the effect that the Flicker Paradigm had on visual perception. The Flicker Paradigm causes a distraction while there is a change made in the image. It was designed to test how long the groups took to react to a change in the visual field. The test is meant to show that the disturbance in the visual field made it much more challenging for the viewer to notice any changes that were made in the image. The hypothesis stated that the experimental group, the group using the Flicker Paradigm, would take longer to notice the change in the visual field than the control group, which had no flicker between the altered images. This is because the disturbance in the visual field caused the brain to miss the change that was made to the image because the information was deemed as unimportant. The majority of the perceived changes occurred in the background of the scene, and were considered minor in reference to the whole scene. This was proven true from the data collected, and coincided with previous tests. (Rensink, R. A. 2000). The data in tables 1.1 and 1.3 shows the individual participant data for the test with a flicker for both tests one and two. Tables 1.2 and 1.4 represent the individual results for the tests with no flicker, or the control group. Graphs 1.1 and 1.2 showed the relationship between the time taken to recognize alterations in the images. The data was taken from the average time to recognize the change from all

In other words, we think we see and pay attention to more than we actually do. We make the mistake of thinking that our vivid visual experience of some aspects of the world means that we are aware of the other aspects of the world that we are not focusing our attention on. One of the major aspects of the illusion of attention is inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness occurs when people do not devote their attention to unexpected objects when they are focusing their attention on one aspect of their visual world. This phenomenon explains the results of the “Gorillas in Our Midst” experiment, as the volunteers who were focused on counting the number of passes failed to notice the gorilla that appeared midway through the video.

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

Prior to the 1960’s, exposure duration was the most common independent variable for perceptual recognition. George Sperling’s dissertation, that one form of presentation of visual stimulation remains available for a brief period of time after the presentation, changed all that by demonstrating two key facts (Haber, 1983).

It is fascinating the amount of trauma and mutilation that one human being can endure. Subdural hematoma, aortic rupture, diabetic ketoacidosis, internal and external blast injuries, acute myocardial infarction, or even third degree burns are no match for modern medicine. In times past, these conditions or injuries were beyond the physicians control and presumed fatal to the individual. However, survival percentages are now higher, and can be attributed to medical advancement and the use of medical checklists. Over the years, the medical practices and research studies from highly acclaimed professionals such as Dr. Atul Gawande, prove that checklists help guide medical professionals to a more precise outcome over medical practices without a checklist involved. Therefore, in order for concise, operative, and reliable medical practice, a checklist guideline is essential as it lessens the margin of error, increasing life expectancy, and preventing situational blindness.

The hypothesis of the study, which is explicitly stated in the abstract section was to examine and reject the possibility that change blindness in previous studies resulted from passive viewing of 2-D displays. Hence, testing the hypothesis in the real-world would still generate similar results as previous studies have concluded from using still images and motion pictures. Briefly mentioned in the abstract and explicitly stated in the results and discussion part of Experiment 1, the researchers were led to a second hypothesis due to the apparent trend within the collected results from the first experiment. The second hypothesis was that younger subjects considered themselves members of the same social group as the experimenters and older subjects considered the experimenters to be members of an out-group. Thus, successful detection depended on social group membership.

Change Blindness is the inability to consciously perceive a changing stimulus in the visual environment and subsequently not being able to report it. It occurs in other sensory modalities as well. Interestingly change blindness has been found to also take place in Olfaction (Sela & Sobel, 2010), Auditory (Eramudugola, Irvine, McAnally, Martin & Mattinglley

Change starts with the perception of its need, so a wrong initial perception can be the first

Spatial cognition concerns the ability to acquire, organize, store and retrieve knowledge of spatial properties (e.g., location, distance, direction) in the complex environment in order to navigate and perceive location precisely (Allen et al., 1996; Hardiess et al., 1999). It is one of the most important abilities that animals and humans have to help them adapt and survive in the world. For example, identifying food location, wayfinding, perceiving scenes are all based on this ability. For many years, elegant behavioral, neurobiological and neuropsychological methods have been used to investigate the spatial behavior of human and non-human species (Denis & Loomis, 2007). In this essay, I am going to talk about how different neuroscientific approaches contribute to our understanding of neural bases of spatial cognition and their role in related processes.

Research has proposed a visual phenomenon that implies that everyone has a visual ‘blind spot’- a small region in each eye that cannot see our surroundings. This phenomenon brings about the theory of inattentional blindness; that we sometimes miss opportunities or events because we are focusing on something else. The concept rose from Harvard psychologists Daniel J Simons and Christopher F Chabris’ 1999 ‘Gorillas in our midst’ study. Their aim was to study the psychology of vision, doing so by creating four 75- seconds films involving two team of 3 players, one team wearing white tops and the other wearing black, moving around passing 2 balls continuously. Two conditions were used; after 44-48 s either a woman holding an umbrella would appear in the film or a woman in a gorilla costume would appear. Participants were asked to watch and observe the videos and monitor the balls being passed back and forth. At the end of the study they were then questioned about the 2 conditions and what they saw. The study’s findings supported the idea of inattentional blindness for dynamic events.

The human brain receives input containing sensory information of different modalities from the surrounding environment. This information is processed in different areas of the brain that do not function in isolation and exhibit interactive plasticity (Roe et al., 1990). The processed information evokes activity in different cortical areas responsible for processing senses and is integrated to give coherent, detailed information (Molholm et al., 2002).

change process can be thought of as an internal locus of control. With this in mind, these

When going about our daily lives, just how much are we missing of the things around us? Visual attention has fascinated psychologists and now research is being carried out to distinguish to what extent, our attention or the absence of it, can affect our day-to-day lives. Change blindness is something we all experience at some point, some more than others. By definition it refers to the failure a person has to notice a change that would otherwise seem obvious when pointed out. (Watson, Leekam, Connolly, Collis, Findlay, McConachie & Rodgers, 2012). Researchers believe there are a few different causes for this such as altered position, eye movements, a visual obstruction or in the