Change Blindness

Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. ‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. ‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’ In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately register

When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because – Earl explained – ‘your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off’ – and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. ‘Instead of spendin

The final entry in our triad of prevailing perceptual filters is change blindness, the failure to notice fluctuations in our visual field.

just as there is a price for paying attention, there is a charge for switching it: For about a half second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an attentional blink, when we can’t register the newly highlighted information consciously.

The researchers dubbed this phenomenon inattentional blindness.