Change Blindness

[Zone-MR]

...we set out to test this idea by having subjects look at natural scenes where a large change suddenly occurs. Usually under such circumstances the change will be immediately seen because the visual transient that it produces pulls processing ressources to the change location. But by the use of special techniques (such as "flicker" or "mudsplashes"), or by making the change simultaneous with an eye saccade, the visual transient is swamped by other transients, and attention is not drawn to the change location. Our results show that in these circumstances, very large changes can be missed, confirming that in a certain sense, our impression of seeing everything is an illusion.