Second Slide

After first paragraph Dont worry this is not a phenomenon that is a defect in the visual system, however it
is used in our everyday lives and the brain has to compromise to carry out one function and lack in another,
this is similar to visual illusions that some of us have looked at.
Our brains arent very good at detecting changes to objects that are occurring right in front of us, changes
like colour, position or if it appears or disappear unless of course you were concentrating in that direction.
We have two voluntary eye movements one being a saccade and the other being smooth pursuit.
A saccade is a fast movement of an eye or a succession of discontinuous (which helps with the visual
disturbance), simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction, like when reading the movements
of the eyes are not continuous but rather discontinuous. The significance of talking about this is that if a
change occurs during a saccade then it serves as a visual disturbance. In 1996 J Grimes did an experiment
whereby they had a scene where parts of it changed at the same time as when the subject made a saccade,
so the subject was unable to detect the change. This also showed that information is not taken in during a
saccade movement, but when the eye stops after the discontinuous movement and then fixation occurs to be
able to get visual information.
Saccade A saccade can be a visual disturbance only when the change occurs during a saccade. This is
difficult to explain how change blindness works to because we cant do that here.
Also change blindness can also occur if were not concentrating on anything in particular.
First Image of Bold Guy
The human visual system is very good at detecting such events as there is no visual disturbance occurring.
Even if you weren't initially fixating the region of the change with your narrow field of high-resolution vision
(the fovea), the low-resolution peripheral field is well suited to detecting the flicker and your eyes jump to the
part of the picture as it is the centre of attention (which is a kind of defence mechanism) or subsequently a
saccade would be executed to bring the changing area to the centre of attention. Most probably not all of you
were looking at the flicker but all of you would have jumped to that spot straight away.
Second + Third Image of Bold Guy
Later, Rensink et al, popularized the "flicker" technique, which he developed in which two images of scenes
alternate repeatedly with a brief (80 millisecond) blank screen after each image, giving the display a flickering
appearance. With the blank screen in place, surprisingly large changes could be made to the scene without
the observer reliably noticing them. Rensink et al (1997) also introduced the term "change blindness."
The onset of each blank field swamps the local motion signals caused by a change, short-circuiting the
automatic system that normally draws attention to its location.
This inability to detect change is due to the visual disturbance swamps the automatic system with signals that
normally draws your attention to the change. The visual disturbance essentially competes with the change
which prevents attention being drawn towards it.
Without automatic control, attention is controlled entirely by slower, higher-level mechanisms which search
the scene, object by object, until attention lands upon the object that is changing. You are actively searching
(full concentration) for the change rather than use the automatic control (dont need full concentrate or any
like for the first image of the bold guy).
Visual transients are fast changes in luminance or colour in the retinal image, such as would be produced by
a sudden appearance or disappearance, or through motion of an element of the scene. It is known that such
transients are detected in the first levels of the visual system, and that attention is automatically attracted to
the location where they occur.
the global disruption presumably creates a large number of transients all over the picture, which mask or
compete with the local transient corresponding to the sought-for change, and which prevent attention being
automatically drawn to it. The change will only be immediately noticed if an observer happens to have been
attending to the changing element at the moment it changes.
Once you are able to see the change it will be imprinted into your mind and you are able to see the change
extremely quickly, if I changed the change then the above will occur again, but you will first search the place
on the scene where the change previously occurred. One more thing is that most people will search the
scene which strikes them as going to be changed, which is based on there own experience and knowledge
(so the experimenters experimented with different types of items, as even if you change the face or
something big you will detect it even with the disturbance as its imprinted in your visual short term memory
more than examples like shadows). Therefore on this picture they would most likely see the rope missing,
they would notice the shadow a lot later as we tend to ignore them as they dont really have any significance.

Local Disruptions
Disturbances can be small in comparison to the size of the change and they need not coincide with the
location of the change: the change takes place in full view. As for change blindness with global interruptions,
changes are very often not noticed. Local disturbances are therefore a lot easier to see as the automatic
control is more able to work in these conditions as it less disturbed but you still have to search. Still even
though the disturbance is small the detection is still not instantaneous as the change is still being masked
and our attention is still being drawn away.
No matter how small the disturbance is (well relatively) this will still affect our automatic system like with the
first image with the bold guys hair our peripheral system causes our eyes to go to the disturbance as it has
attracted attention and act as decoys diverting our attention away from the actual change (also look at the
colour of the disturbance, it is completely different from the actual background which also helps to attract our
attention).
As we are always looking at the thing or part which attracts the most attention to us. If I showed you a blank
piece of paper and told you to concentrate on it, the path of your eyes would be everywhere, but if I drew a
dot you would most likely concentrate on that part of the image.
Slow Changes
With slow changes, the change is made so slowly that the attention-grabbing processes that would normally
cause attention to be attracted to the location of the change can no longer operate. The observer must them
rely on their visual short term memory and not on searching (so not always do you need a visual disturbance
to generate change blindness). Our visual system isnt able to detect such slow changes, probably as they
arent really that essential compared to quick changes.
However even if you are aware the fact that where the colour change is taking place, it is still difficult see
whether the colour change has started or not, especially with this video.
Michael Mosley
Our brains aren't very good at noticing things and are easily distracted, but this may be also one of the
reasons that the subjects noticed the change, as they were distracted by something to do with the
experimenter (or coincidently noticed) that allowed them to recognise the change.
If in the experiment, they changed the clothes while the subject was distracted instead of changing the
person, then they would most likely find that all the people they experimented on would not be able to notice.
However if you changed the person from a girl to a guy, a lot more people would notice.
This experiment isnt as bad, but another one was conducted, whereby the experimenter is behind a counter
and ducks down and changes with another and the subject is fails to notice the change. A dont notice
even though they spent time there filling in a form.
Women may be better able to do this as they are more able to as they have brains adapted for these type
situations. While males wouldnt really care less what someone is wearing. But in the end it all depends on
the individual, as your brains are always interacting with the higher and lower processes.
Causes
In slow changes, we first have to have the colour of the part that changes previously in memory and then our
brain makes the comparison with the new colour change automatically.
All Examples previous - Because of the limitations in short term visual memory, very little of the scene is
likely to have been previously stored, and the chances of comparative detection is very limited.
The inability to compare two different images is the basis of the flicker paradigm.
The short term memory loss works, because firstly the subject may not be concentrating on the details of the
part thats going to be changed, second they are disturbed temporarily (which reduces their short term
memory of the event prior) and lastly they are required to compare the images in memory, which is
determined by a lot factors and even your gut feeling have been seen to be able to contribute to this.
Related Factors
Our attention in visual short term memory is limited in spatial and its extent over time. Spatial memory relies
on a cognitive map (visualisation and the storage of spatial memory). Over time we seem to lose more and
more of what is stored in the visual short term memory.
Inattentional blindness is similar to change blindness whereby people often arent able to see things which
are actually there. This is probably more to do with attention than visual short term memory.
We are limited by the amount of information processed at any particular time, therefore we can only
concentrate on one thing at a time in order for it to be significant to be able to store it in our visual
memory.
?
Change blindness is a particular problem to drivers, as we are unable to take in all the information in the
surrounding scene (at any given time we only concentrate on one thing at a time); this most often is a cause

for accidents. A car coming is slow while something coming out of no where is easier able to detect. Also this
is why mobile phones are banned, generally drugs and alcohol with driving is illegal (affects motor skills as
well)
Latent inhibition is something that is important to understand for why our brains must compromise with
change blindness.
Latent inhibition is a process by which exposure to a stimulus prevents conditioned associations (or
associative learning) with that stimulus being formed by disregarding it or inhibiting memory formation which
is an automatic response and is thought to prevent information overload (as we only have a certain capacity
for memory). As we look at the definition of Inattentional Blindness by concentrating on one thing at a time
we are screening out all the things that are not needed or significant. For those with low latent inhibition they
are not able to screen out incoming visual stimuli. They would most probably be able to detect the changes
before they go crazy (low IQ Psychosis, High IQ creative geniuses).
We have the impression of seeing everything because we know we have access to everything, even though
without actually accessing something, no detailed information is available about it. This explains the apparent
paradox between the feeling of richness we have of our visual environments, and our striking inability, in
change blindness experiments, of knowing what has changed.
The significance of researching change blindness, its related factors and visual illusions is that it allows us to
go deeper inside the visual system. Through the inabilities of parts of the system to do certain things allows
us to be able to see how the brain works and its significance. When we have a reasoning why this happens
and relate it scientifically we can essentially be able to solve many other problems as we have knowledge of
how a particular system in the brain is able to work.