Change blindness.
Abstract
Although at any instant we experience a rich, detailed visual world, we do not use such visual details to form a stable representation across views. Over the past five years, researchers have focused increasingly on 'change blindness' (the inability to detect changes to an object or scene) as a means to examine the nature of our representations. Experiments using a diverse range of methods and displays have produced strikingly similar results: unless a change to a visual scene produces a localizable change or transient at a specific position on the retina, generally, people will not detect it. We review theory and research motivating work on change blindness and discuss recent evidence that people are blind to changes occurring in photographs, in motion pictures and even in real-world interactions. These findings suggest that relatively little visual information is preserved from one view to the next, and question a fundamental assumption that has underlain perception research for centuries: namely, that we need to store a detailed visual representation in the mind/brain from one view to the next.
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Change of experience need not always entail a corresponding experience of change.
“A long tradition of experiments in “change blindness” reveal that change of experience need not always entail a corresponding experience of change [68].”
From Ethical considerations for the use of brain–computer interfaces for cognitive enhancement (2024) · cites this paper as [68]
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- Authors
- Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T.
- Venue
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 1997-10
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 261-267
- ISSN
- 1364-6613 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4234969819
- Cited by
- 1,039
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 31 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 40 · 2023: 41 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 36 · 2020: 36 · 2019: 69 · 2018: 59 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 26 · 2014: 45 · 2013: 27 · 2012: 28
- FWCI
- 4.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Keywords
- change blindness, visual scene representation, visual perception, visual memory, object recognition, scene perception, visual constancy, cinema, photographs
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