Change Blindness

OALib, 2014

Change blindness is an important phenomenon where a driver may skip some information in the driving scene due to its rapidly changing and dynamic character. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of simultaneous emotions and driving tasks on change blindness. Twenty college students with driving licenses were taken as the study subjects. The experimental program involved two types of emotions combined with four driving tasks. Showing 10 minutes movie to arouse two types of emotions was one methodology and using E-prime software to show one-shot paradigm of change blindness was the other. The results show that emotion and driving tasks affect change blindness. The subjects took longer time to perceive the changes in the mood of negative emotion than they did in the mood of positive emotion. The level of change detection was found to decrease after the driving tasks were performed. Furthermore, the tasks with traffic signs showed more change blindness than those without traffic signs. The groups performing the turning-right tasks exhibited more change blindness than those performing the going-ahead tasks. The practical contributions of the present study are discussed in relation to the human-oriented design of traffic signs.

This study examined the notion that visually fixating at a stimulus can help prevent change blindness from occurring and looks at change blindness blindness, a common metacognitive error shown by participants. 77 participants were randomly selected and assigned to different conditions. Experimental group had an extra task that they had to perform while attending to the video and the control group only had to watch the video. Participants in both conditions were required to fill out a questionnaire measuring their confidence levels to notice the change. Both conditions failed to detect changes with insignificant difference between the groups, even though the stimulus was visually fixated. Most participants overestimated their change detecting abilities, predicting in the questionnaire that they would notice the change, while in practice they did not. Thus an extra task in the experimental condition did not produce a cognitive overload leading to change blindness. Still participants failed to detect changes when the stimulus was fixated and failed to measure their change detecting abilities realistically.

Wiley Interdisciplinary …, 2011

Change blindness is the failure to notice an obvious change. Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice the existence of an unexpected item. In each case, we fail to notice something that is clearly visible once we know to look for it. Despite similarities, each type of blindness has a unique background and distinct theoretical implications. Here, we discuss the central paradigms used to explore each phenomenon in a historical context. We also outline the central findings from each field and discuss their implications for visual perception and attention. In addition, we examine the impact of task and observer effects on both types of blindness as well as common pitfalls and confusions people make while studying these topics.

Consciousness and Cognition, 2010

The goal of this study is to characterize observers' abilities to detect gradual changes and to explore putative dissociations between conscious experience of change and behavioral adaptation to a changing stimulus. We developed a new experimental paradigm in which, on each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants had to reproduce it. In some conditions, the target pattern was incrementally rotated over successive trials and participants were either informed or not of this change. We analyzed both awareness of the changes and the dynamics of behavioral adaptation, in a way that makes it possible to assess both variability and accuracy as they change over time. Results indicate a dissociation between change awareness and behavioral adaptation to the changes, and support the notion that unconscious representations of visual stimuli are more precise and detailed than previously suggested. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of change detection. Crown steps of 1°of visual angle on each display, with each display separated from the next one by a brief blank screen (1500 ms). Participants were instructed to press a button if they had noticed the scene change. The results indicated that half of the participants remained unaware of the change up to a dramatic rotation of 48°. However, when a shift back to the original scene was produced after a cumulated rotation of 20°or 30°that had so far remained undetected, most subjects could then clearly see the change. Authors concluded that visual memory had been updated, albeit in the absence of awareness. Indeed, if visual memory had not been updated at all, participants would not have been able to detect the change when presented anew with the original display. These results clearly challenge the idea that change blindness arises from a failure to maintain relevant information in memory (see also, .

In Encyclopedia of Consciousness, Vol 1. W. Banks (ed). New York: Elsevier. pp. 47-59. , 2009

As observers, we generally have a strong impression of seeing everything in front of us at any moment. But compelling as it is, this impression is false – there are severe limits to what we can consciously experience in everyday life. Much of the evidence for this claim has come from two phenomena: change blindness (CB) and inattentional blindness (IB). CB refers to the failure of an observer to visually experience changes that are easily seen once noticed. This can happen even if the changes are large, constantly repeat, and the observer has been informed that they will occur. A related phenomenon is IB – the failure to visually experience an object or event when attention is directed elsewhere. For example, observers may fail to notice an unexpected object that enters their visual field, even if this object is large, appears for several seconds, and has important consequences for the selection of action. Both phenomena involve a striking failure to report an object or event that is easily seen once noticed. As such, both are highly counterintuitive, not only in the subjective sense that observers have difficulty believing they could fail so badly at seeing but also in the objective sense that these findings challenge many existing ideas about how we see. But as counterintuitive as these phenomena are, progress has been made in understanding them. Indeed, doing so has allowed us to better understand the limitations of human perception in everyday life and to gain new insights into how our visual systems create the picture of the world that we experience each moment our eyes are open.