Perception and Action
132 Inattentional Blindness
Learning Objectives
Be able to define change blindness.
Know that object-selective neurons fail to respond to many things which go unattended.
Change blindness refers to the perceptual phenomenon that the observer fails to identify when there is a change in a visual stimulus. We fail to perceive so many things that go unattended. Classic change blindness demos, such as this one with static images or this one with real people, show how much of a scene we do not perceive. If you don’t have some kind of bottom-up salience cue (motion, color contrast, etc.), you need some top-down attention allocation if you’re going to be aware of something. This relates to how object-selective neurons fail to respond to many things that go unattended. For example, a major source of image motion is eye motion—we’re making a saccade every few hundred milliseconds. How does our brain handle that? Saccadic masking: our brains blank out all the wild motion created by saccades. It would be impossible for our neurons to respond to every motion created by saccades.
Watch this video on the Monkey Business Illusion to learn more about inattentional blindness!
Cheryl Olman PSY 3031 Detailed Outline
Provided by: University of Minnesota
Download for free at http://vision.psych.umn.edu/users/caolman/courses/PSY3031/
License of original source: CC Attribution 4.0
Adapted by: Joshua Lee