Chapter 7, Problem 1ST-236

Summary Introduction

To determine:

What would make a person more or less susceptible to change blindness?

Concept introduction:

Change blindness is the phenomenon in which individuals fail to notice big changes around them. Our attention systems can only process so much information, and sometimes our brain has to filter out, or ignore, some of the things in our environment. This can be auditory information as well as visual information. It is not that we do not see or hear things, it is just that our brains aren’t attending to and encoding all of the information. Therefore, we may not remember everything or even notice if something changes.

Explanation of Solution

Suggested responses:

In the experiement by Simons and Levin, participants were susceptible to change blindness when the stranger was replaced with someone of the same race and gender. This tells us that we may attend more to the “big picture” features of a person, such as whether they are a man or woman and the color of their skin. Smaller details, like the person’s clothing or color of their eyes, are not always the focus of our attention because our brains are busy thinking of other things, like what the stranger is asking us or how we can help them with directions.

Chapter 7 also tells us that our attentional system prioritizes faces (page 236). Therefore, we would be more likely to notice that the person in front of us got switched if they had distinctive facial features, such as a really big nose or glasses. We would also be more likely to notice a switch if we already knew the person and were familiar with their features, such as a family member or friend. Big visual changes, such as neutral-colored clothing being switched with bright neon clothing, or a much taller or shorter person that causes us to change our head positioning, may also trigger our attentional systems.

Because our attentional systems rely strongly on our visual sense (what we see), we will be more likely to notice big changes that are in our direct visual field. For example, we are robably more likely to notice if a person’s hat changes compared with their shoes because we’re looking at their head. Small changes, like a light graycoat being switched with a dark graycoat, aren’t as likely to draw our visual attention, making us more susceptible to change blindness.