Current approaches to change blindness

Across saccades, blinks, blank screens, movie cuts, and other interruptions, ob-servers fail to detect substantial changes to the visual details of objects and scenes. This inability to spot changes (“change blindness”) is the focus of this special issue of Visual Cognition. This introductory paper briefly reviews recent studies of change blindness, noting the relation of these findings to earlier re-search and discussing the inferences we can draw from them. Most explanations of change blindness assume that we fail to detect changes because the changed display masks or overwrites the initial display. Here I draw a distinction between intentional and incidental change detection tasks and consider how alternatives to the “overwriting ” explanation may provide better explanations for change blindness. Imagine you are watching a movie in which an actor is sitting in a cafeteria with a jacket slung over his shoulder. The camera then cuts to a close-up and his jacket is now over the back of his chair. You might think that everyone would notice this obvious editing mistake. Yet, recent research on visual memory has found that people are surprisingly poor at noticing large changes to objects, photographs, and motion pictures from one instant to the next (see Simons & Levin, 1997 for a review). Although researchers have long noted the existenc