Change Blindness

Change Blindness

After investigating spatial cognition and the construction of cognitive maps in my previous paper, "Where Am I Going? Where Have I Been: Spatial Cognition and Navigation", and growing in my comprehension of the more complex elements of the nervous system, the development of an informed discussion of human perception has become possible. The formation of cognitive maps, which serve as internal representations of the world, are dependent upon the human capacities for vision and visual perception (1). The objects introduced into the field of vision are translated into electrical messages, which activate the neurons of the retina. The resultant retinal message is organized into several forms of sensation and is transmitted to the brain so that neural representations of given surroundings may be recorded as memory (2). I suggested in my previous paper that these neural representations must be maintained and progressively updated with each successive change in environment and movement of the eye. Furthermore, I claimed that this information processing produces a constant, stable experience of a dynamic, external world (1). However, myriad studies and the testimony of any motorist who has had the unfortunate experience of hitting an unseen object, contradict the universality of that claim and illuminate a startling reality: human beings do not always see those objects presented in their visual field nor alterations in an observed scene (3,4,5,6,7,8,9). The failure to consciously witness change when distracted for mere milliseconds by saccade or artificial blink events is referred to as "change blindness." In order to comprehend this phenomenon, the physical act of looking and the process of seeing must be diffe...

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5)Cognet, a site on Cognition

http://cognet.mit.edu/perspective/item.tcl?msg_id=00005N

6)Memory For centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real world change, An article by Levin, Simons, Angelone, and Chabris

http://wjg.harvard.edu/~cfc/Levin2002.pdf

7) Scott-Brown, K.C. & Orbach, H.S. (1998) "Contrast Discrimination, Non-Uniform Patterns and Change Blindness". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. 256 (1410): 2159-2164.

8)Max Planck Institute

http://wjg.harvard.edu/~cfc/Levin2002.pdf

9)A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness , Behavioral and Brain Sciences article from 2001

http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/05/06/bbs00000506-00/index.html

10)Glasgow Caledonian University, current research in vision sciences

http://www.gcal.ac.uk/sls/Vision/index.htmlresearch/current_research/h.html