Did you know that ALL humans are blind and that the consensus is we all should be thrilled about it. It deals with attention, i.e., the selection of some information for further processing and the simultaneous inhibition of other information.
You see, paying attention to one thing requires we be blind to the overwhelming majority of information we received from both our external and internal environments. Look at it as your trusty filter that allows you to sift through the constant chatter of your senses and thoughts, the chatter that tries to tell you when you are hungry, a bit cold or the person sitting next to you is wearing a neon coat.
What it is, is we are literally blind when paying attention to one things, something. There is a video of this example out on the internet, see link below, of people passing a ball back and forth and you count the number of times the ball was passed. Later, the experimenters asked, “Did you see the gorilla?”
Watch here: https://youtu.be/Ahg6qcgoay4
Change blindness can happen not only when we observe photo’s and video’s, but also in real life. For instance, when you are talking to a stranger, say they are asking for directions, if we are briefly distracted and the stranger swaps out with another person in the middle of the conversation, we are unlikely to notice that we are talking to someone else.
Cell phones, it is an interesting that we would fail completely to notice a clown unicycling down the street while on our cell phones. This is how cell phones are used against us when we suddenly find ourselves being robbed, we will NOT notice the robbers approach if we happen to be engrossed with something on our cell phones.
Another tidbit, “It appears that even when we look sometimes we don’t see.” We have limitations on our sensory systems so our perceptions thru sensory signals can be limited. Next, is our limitations on short term memories, i.e., short term memory lasts about thirty seconds at the best of times but when overwhelmed, our sensory systems, that can be even shorter. So, when we experience complex scene we cannot possibly remember all of the details in it.
One more tidbit that makes this even more complex, change blindness can also come from conceptual representations of our experiences in our memories. Our concepts are abstract in nature, they are the ‘gist’ of our memory traces. It comes down to our grossly overestimating our live scene processing abilities and underestimate our own change blindness.
It seems to work thusly, “our facility for paying attention overwhelmingly works to make us notice ONLY a SMALL amount of information so that we have a chance of actually processing it, and, in certain situations, remembering it for the future.
Memory feeds into “attention” to tells it what ‘important’ information is, based on past experience, and attention feeds back into memory to update our internal representations of the world.
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