Change blindness

Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. For example, observers often fail to notice major differences introduced into an image while it flickers off and on again. People's poor ability to detect changes has been argued to reflect fundamental limitations of human attention. Change blindness has become a highly researched topic and some have argued that it may have important practical implications in areas such as eyewitness testimony and distractions while driving. Some principles underlying change blindness include absence of focused attention, object swap during brief obstructed view, combination of low subjective importance and contrast energy, and viewing context. Change blindness is related to inattentional blindness. Researchers have focused on change blindness over the years as a way to understand how visual representations are formed. Experiments have consistently shown similar results: unless a change in the visual scene produces a localizable transient signal at a specific position on the retina, people typically fail to detect the change.