Change Blindness: a Literature Review on Attention
Change Blindness: A Literature Review on Attention
When going about our daily lives, just how much are we missing of the things around us? Visual attention has fascinated psychologists and now research is being carried out to distinguish to what extent, our attention or the absence of it, can affect our day-to-day lives. Change blindness is something we all experience at some point, some more than others. By definition it refers to the failure a person has to notice a change that would otherwise seem obvious when pointed out. (Watson, Leekam, Connolly, Collis, Findlay, McConachie & Rodgers, 2012). Researchers believe there are a few different causes for this such as altered position, eye movements, a visual obstruction or in the interest to us, the lack of attention. Where visual attention is applied to a particular space, an accurate detection of specific features can be expected. However, in the absence of spatial attention, details are more likely to be incorrect or missed entirely. (Utochkin, 2011). We can be made aware of this phenomenon by using many different detection paradigms. One of the most common of these used when researching change detection is the flicker paradigm. I shall be looking at several different research reviews highlighting the way in which the change blindness can be measured through change detection using the flicker paradigm, and how this can be associated with attention.
Change blindness is one of the most researched paradigms of visual attention. Although it has only been within the last decade that psychologists have become increasingly more interested in this phenomenon, the first mentioning of change blindness can be traced as far back as the 1890’s. Although people were aware, most research or true understanding of its relevance to visual attention in psychology did not really begin until the 1980’s. Despite the lack of knowledge of its technical term, many of us are more aware of the ways we can detect change blindness
When going about our daily lives, just how much are we missing of the things around us? Visual attention has fascinated psychologists and now research is being carried out to distinguish to what extent, our attention or the absence of it, can affect our day-to-day lives. Change blindness is something we all experience at some point, some more than others. By definition it refers to the failure a person has to notice a change that would otherwise seem obvious when pointed out. (Watson, Leekam, Connolly, Collis, Findlay, McConachie & Rodgers, 2012). Researchers believe there are a few different causes for this such as altered position, eye movements, a visual obstruction or in the interest to us, the lack of attention. Where visual attention is applied to a particular space, an accurate detection of specific features can be expected. However, in the absence of spatial attention, details are more likely to be incorrect or missed entirely. (Utochkin, 2011). We can be made aware of this phenomenon by using many different detection paradigms. One of the most common of these used when researching change detection is the flicker paradigm. I shall be looking at several different research reviews highlighting the way in which the change blindness can be measured through change detection using the flicker paradigm, and how this can be associated with attention.
Change blindness is one of the most researched paradigms of visual attention. Although it has only been within the last decade that psychologists have become increasingly more interested in this phenomenon, the first mentioning of change blindness can be traced as far back as the 1890’s. Although people were aware, most research or true understanding of its relevance to visual attention in psychology did not really begin until the 1980’s. Despite the lack of knowledge of its technical term, many of us are more aware of the ways we can detect change blindness