Inattentional Blindness In Human 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.

Over time there has been many different experiments done to show how inattentional blindness works, as well as, how our brains can over looks things that are right in front of us and/or actions that is going on right in front of us. Here are a few of the experiments that show this.

The United States has many minority groups that face oppression. In the media today, most of the minority issues that are highlighted involve the LGBTQ community, women, and racial minorities. Differently-abled people are rarely given the space to share with the world how they see it. This literature review will discuss terms related to visual impairment, legislative measures taken in the United States to assist those with severe visual impairments, and the oppression and discrimination those who are visually impaired face.

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.

List at least three resources you should use to determine the visual and academic ability of a student with a visual impairment.

The concept of change blindness has been addressed over the course of nearly half a century, with increasing focus on the subject throughout the past five years (3). Although biologists, psychologists, and philosophers have yet to resolve definitively the paradox of looking without seeing, the investigation of each theory on the matter yields deeper insight into visual perception and sight as well as a decreasingly incorrect understanding of those components of the nervous system, which are crucial for visual cognition. Under normal viewing conditions, changes produce transient signals that can draw attention. Change blindness studies are designed to eliminate or block these transient signals by inserting a visual disruption when the change occurs (3). Flicker Paradigm studies examine the occurrence of change blindness and attempt to explain the inability to not see that which is directly in front of our eyes. The Flicker Paradigm demonstrates the essentiality of attention in the process of seeing (4). The alternation of an object and a modified version of that same object is interrupted by millisecond flashes of blank space. Subjects are then asked to report changes in the images.

Another visual condition that has intrigued the neurologist for over a century is a condition called visual neglect. After having a stroke in her parietal lobes in her brain, Peggy Palmer had normal vision, which should allow her to draw a copy an image without difficulty. When Peggy was asked to draw a copy of a daisy, they found that she only would draw the right half of the daisies image. She didn’t realize this until the it was told to her, then she could see that she in fact was missing the entire left half of the daisy. Dr. Ramachandran explains that as we see an object, the visual input will split into two different pathways. One is the “how?” and the other is the “what?”. The “how” deals with the area of the brain that mainly controls

Many studies and experiments have been conducted to explain why change blindness occurs and in what situations is change blindness more likely to occur. Literature on change blindness is quite extensive, as it is an emerging area in psychology. A number of researchers have conducted experiments into the key areas where change blindness has been found to cause consequential outcomes. These areas include the effects of change blindness on eye witness testimonies, driving ability, and effects on autism. Literature on change blindness places an emphasis on methodology and this literature review will focus primarily on this. According to Simons & Levin (1998) change blindness is the phenomenon that occurs when a person fails to detect large changes between one viewed scene and another. Recent studies show similar findings and evidence as to the original literature into change blindness. As stated by Rensink, 2002 (as cited in Davies & Hone, 2007), change blindness has been the subject of intensive research in recent years beginning with studies in which researchers manipulated the content of abstract scenes.

In previous research, it has been claimed that that ordinary perceivers operate under a grand illusion of perception, and illusion that can be unmasked by change blindness and inattentional blindness. Change blindness and inattentional blindness are phenomena relating to the inability to notice particular stimuli within our visual field, a sort of lapse in our visual system. Change blindness is when a person fails to notice a change within their visual scene because the change occurs during a moment when the intake of visual stimuli is disrupted. Similar to change blindness, inattentional blindness is characterized by the failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected object because attention is engaged in another object, task, or event. Cohen

Blindness is a motif that readers see throughout King Lear in many characters such as Lear and Gloucester since they are unable to see the truth. Although blindness in the modern world is defined as not having sight, William Shakespeare tells readers that being able to see does not mean morally and spiritually you can see. Lear’s blindness causes him not to see the treachery behind Goneril and Regan at the beginning of the play which causes him to lose his throne and go mad near the end. Also Gloucester is also blind as he does not see the lies hidden behind the truths that Edmund tells him and later when Cornwall pulls out Gloucester’s eyes, Gloucester is able to see the truths and realizes that Edgar is the legitimate son. Shakespeare shows us throughout King Lear that seeing is more than just through our eyes. The play is centered on true visions and blindness.

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 the article, Maintaining perceptual constancy while remaining vigilant: Left hemisphere change blindness and right hemisphere vigilance; says that there are significant amounts of writings that propose the dominances in the right hemisphere related to the predatory survival stimuli. On the other hand, there was a failure to discern apparent differences in the visual scene such as, looking at a picture with a tree, a bird, and a birdhouse, then given the same picture but one thing was missing like the bird and you didn’t notice, this would be called a silent change. Both right and left visual fields were studied, the left identified changes faster than the right, determining the right hemisphere had advantages in detecting change. This proposes

83-5 Your focus of attention can be larger areas, but this is harder to maintain — if it begins to slip, withdraw the attention to a smaller circle or single object/point, then gradually enlarge the circle of attention again.

The human mind is a very fascinating subject. This is the place where tons of ideas are created, translated and then put into action. It is hard to fully understand it, as we still haven’t, yet it is a compelling subject to observe. We think about so much stuff and then transform those thoughts into an action and do so much without a second thought. It feels as though our minds are going a million miles per hour and we are always on our toes waiting for what is to come and expecting everything. We like to believe that we are aware of our surroundings and that we know everything that is going on. However according to many tests that are conducted, we are proving to be very clueless and unobservant to the things that surround us. Perhaps we are not clueless, instead maybe we are afraid to admit what we do see.

Research carried out on attention has mainly been associated with the selective processing of incoming sensory information. It proposes, to some degree, our awareness of the world depends on what we choose to focus on and not simply the stimulation received by our senses. Attention is often linked to a filter that screens out most potential stimuli whilst allowing a select few to pass through into our conscious awareness, however, a great deal of debate has been devoted to where the filter is situated in the information processing chain (Martindale, 1991). Psychologists have made extensive contributions to this subject matter in the past century. Notable examples include Donald Broadbent's filter theory of attention (1958), which set the