Change blindness

One of the limits of our attention, were we sometimes not able to detect changes in visual stimuli.

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References

Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (p. 114).

The difficulty in detecting changes in scenes is called change blindness (Rinsing, 2002). The importance of attention (or lack of it) in determining changes blindness is demonstrated by the fact that when a cue was added indicating which part of a scene had been changed, participants detected the changes much more quickly (also see Henderson & Hollingworth, 2003). Indeed, once you know what is different you cannot imagine how you could not see it in the first place.

Backlinks

• Attention limits
  • Change blindness
• Comparing side-by-side circumvents our cognitive limits
  • Comparing two things are easier when what you're comparing are visible. There's a tendency for software engineers to flip their windows or screens very rapidly to compare two things and most often they can't spot the difference (Change blindness).
• Continuity errors in movies
  • Continuity errors in movies is one of the example of Change blindness where the scenes from one to another seemed to have an important detail that was not continuous. See reference for example.