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Change blindness is when observers fail to notice visual changes, as the brain provides a general overview rather than processing scenes in detail. This phenomenon affects everyone to some degree, but autistic people tend to experience less of it. Change blindness becomes more extreme with visual distractions and when people are focused on tasks. Researchers conduct experiments to study this phenomenon.
Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon in which observers fail to notice visual changes, sometimes very extreme, demonstrating that the brain does not always process scenes in fine detail, but rather provides a general overview. A famous and oft-repeated experiment to demonstrate change blindness is the basketball game scenario, in which observers are asked to watch a short clip of a basketball game. Often, the experimenter provides a task, such as counting steps or falls. Most observers don’t notice that a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the field, gestures, and then walks away again.
Despite its name, change blindness is not a visual impairment, nor is it a visual impairment. All people demonstrate this to some degree, even though some seem to be less inclined than others. Autism, for example, tends to reduce the amount of change blindness an observer experiences. Research on autism and visual processing suggests that autistic people are less able to ignore extraneous details and therefore tend to notice when something changes in their environment.
Visual images go through a number of forms of processing when they hit the brain so that the viewer can make sense of the image. The brain can assign a sense of direction, name objects in the scene, and provide context to help the viewer interpret it. Change blindness appears to be the result of the brain’s desire to provide a quick overview of a scene for the benefit of the observer; for example, the brain might decide that a person is looking at a busy airport terminal or a forest scene based on general information, but would not provide specific details such as the precise location of each tree or the color of luggage at the corner of the room. ‘eye.
Change blindness becomes even more extreme when a visual distraction is present. In the woodland scene example, if a deer leaps across the viewer’s line of sight, they may not notice that a hunter has appeared. In a busy airport terminal, your eye will be drawn to a moving baggage cart or an aircraft taking off, and you may miss a change on a departures or arrivals board. Asking people to complete tasks can also exacerbate change blindness, as they focus on the task instead of what they are seeing. Therefore, the busy flyer scanning the departure board for a connecting flight may not notice someone getting in his way.
Researchers studying this phenomenon conduct experiments such as randomly switching who a subject is talking to or editing films to insert scenes or make characters switch heads mid-scene. In both examples, many observers do not notice the change, even though it becomes apparent once they do and will always be easy to spot in the future.
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