Change blindness: past, present, and future

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.11.006

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2005, Pages 16-20

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.11.006 Get rights and content

Change blindness is the striking failure to see large changes that normally would be noticed easily. Over the past decade this phenomenon has greatly contributed to our understanding of attention, perception, and even consciousness. The surprising extent of change blindness explains its broad appeal, but its counterintuitive nature has also engendered confusions about the kinds of inferences that legitimately follow from it. Here we discuss the legitimate and the erroneous inferences that have been drawn, and offer a set of requirements to help separate them. In doing so, we clarify the genuine contributions of change blindness research to our understanding of visual perception and awareness, and provide a glimpse of some ways in which change blindness might shape future research.

Introduction

The term ‘change blindness’ refers to the surprising difficulty observers have in noticing large changes to visual scenes 1, 2. Although failures to detect change have been studied for decades [3], recent work has brought change blindness out of the laboratory and into the realm of more typical perceptual experience. But although the often counterintuitive nature of change blindness has been the source of considerable insight into visual perception and awareness, it has also been the source of considerable confusion as to the inferences that can be legitimately drawn from it. Consequently, the results of these studies have sometimes been mischaracterized, leading to extreme and relatively unsupported claims, some of which have gained traction in the field. In rejecting these claims, some researchers have been tempted to summarily dismiss the entire field, essentially throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The goal of this opinion article is to counter this potentially unfortunate trend by: (i) highlighting the new and important insights that have legitimately been obtained from recent work on change blindness; (ii) identifying common misconceptions about the kinds of inferences that can be drawn from it; (iii) delineating the constraints on such inferences so that future work will not fall prey to these misunderstandings; and (iv) describing some new ways in which change blindness can provide a useful tool for the study of attention, awareness, and visual perception.

Section snippets

Insights obtained from change blindness

The recent surge of interest in change blindness followed decades of related work on the interplay between visual perception and memory [3]. For example, numerous previous studies showed that observers often fail to notice the displacement of a target dot or the change in shape of a line-drawn object if the change occurs during an eye movement (see [4] for an overview). This earlier work addressed many of the same theoretical issues revivified by more recent research, including limitations on

Limits to what can be inferred from change blindness

Unfortunately, these important advances have been clouded by the drawing of several overly strong conclusions. For example, earlier work on visual integration inspired the claim that our visual representations are sparse, incomplete, or absent altogether 33, 34, and the striking blindness to large changes in scenes strengthened the appeal of this view. If true, this conclusion would require radical revisions of our way of thinking about perception, memory, and awareness [35].

However, the

The future of change blindness research

Although there are limits to some of the conclusions that can be drawn from change blindness, considerable potential remains. Change blindness has already contributed to our understanding of various mechanisms of visual perception, including those that are central to our conscious experience of vision. It has extended the reach of empirical techniques beyond the traditional boundaries of cognition and perception research, providing a new way to explore individual differences, expertise, and

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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Change blindness: past, present, and future

Introduction

Section snippets

Insights obtained from change blindness

Limits to what can be inferred from change blindness

The future of change blindness research

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Cogn. Psychol.

Cogn. Psychol.

Cortex

Cogn. Psychol.

Trends Neurosci.

Vision Res.

To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes

Psychol. Sci.

Change detection

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

A theory of visual stability across saccadic eye movements

Behav. Brain Sci.

On the failure to detect changes in scenes across saccades

Failure to detect changes to attended objects in motion pictures

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

Failure to detect changes to people in a real-world interaction

Psychon. Bull. Rev.

Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm

Br. J. Psychol.

Change blindness blindness: The metacognitive error of overestimating change-detection ability

Vis. Cogn.

Effects of scene inversion on change detection of targets matched for visual salience

J. Vis.

Failure to see more than one change at a time

J. Vis.

Binding in short-term visual memory

J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

Detecting changes in novel, complex three-dimensional objects

Vis. Cogn.

What you see is what you need

J. Vis.

The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions

Nature

Attentional enhancement opposite a peripheral flash revealed using change blindness

Psychol. Sci.

Perceptual grouping in change detection

Percept. Psychophys.