Jasmine B. MacDonald

Change blindness and inattentional blindness

Sensation and perception is one of my favourite areas of psychology. In this article, I explain how visual illusions are the reason I got into psychology and provide some video examples of two interesting failures of visual awareness: change blindness and inattentional blindness.

Sensation is the ways that the body gathers information about the environment and transmits the information to the brain for initial processing.

Perception is the active process of the brain selecting, organising and interpreting sensory information.

(Bernstein et al., 2018)

My psychology origin story

I went through most of my primary and secondary schooling loving and doing a lot of writing, debating, music and drama. I had always thought I’d end up in some kind of creative or communications work, like theatre or journalism.

When I was in about year 10, my mum’s friend was clearing out her professional library. She had studied psychology and in this clear out I inherited a first year (101 style) psychology textbook. I flicked through, trying to work out where to start reading and I found the chapter on sensation and perception. I thought that chapter and the various visual illusions within it were the coolest things I had ever seen!

I have always been interested in mental health, psychological distress and understanding trauma exposure and how it impacts our lives. I ended up doing my Ph.D in this area and have published many journal articles and practice resources on these things. But in my heart, I will always have a soft spot for sensation and perception. My first research job was in a sensory lab.

Psychological phenomena like sensory illusions represent the shared experiences humans have in being lead astray about our environment. Our big, evolved, wrinkly brains accurately and efficiently process massive amounts of sensory information with ease for us most of the time and then boom – ‘Is that dress blue and black? No, it’s white and gold! Wait – what even is life?!’

What are change blindness and inattentional blindness?

Our brains do a great job of screening out a massive amount of irrelevant sensory information so that we don’t become overwhelmed and so that we can make meaning of the world around us. The ability to focus attention on certain objects and details (selective attention) at the expense of others is adaptive – but it can also result in some pretty surprising outcomes. I want to show you some examples of two of these surprising outcomes.

“Change blindness and inattentional blindness are both failures of visual awareness. Change blindness is the failure to notice an obvious change. Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice the existence of an unexpected item.”

(Jensen et al., 2011)

Examples of change blindness

This first one brings me so much joy.

If you have not seen a show called Brain Games, do yourself a favour and check it out! It is very fun and interesting. There is an episode that focuses completely on attention and they have one segment in particular in that episode that is a great example of change blindness:

An example of inattentional blindness

In this video, count the number of times the players in white make a pass.

The real world implications

These videos are fun. Almost everyone will have a similar experience when they watch them. It can be eye-opening and even a relief to know that there are limitations in the way we perceive the world. But there are some serious real world implications, most notably when it comes to eye-witness experiences of crime.

Often, eye-witnesses of a crime were not aware at the time that a crime had taken place or that the people or situations they were observing would need to be remembered later. These people are selectively attending to other things as they go about their day. In these situations, we see sensation and perception crossover with another awesome area of psychology: forensic psychology.

If you want to read more, this article is a cool place to start: ‘Crime Blindness: The Impact of Inattentional Blindness on Eyewitness Awareness, Memory, and Identification’ (Wulff & Hyman, 2021).

References

Bernstien et al. (2018). Psychology: Australia and New Zealand (2nd ed.). Cengage.

Jensen et al. (2011). Change blindness and inattentional blindness. Cognitive Science, 2(5), 529-546.

Wulff, A.N., and Hyman, I.E. (2021). Crime blindness: The impact of inattentional blindness on eyewitness awareness, memory, and identification. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 36(356).

Photo

Photo by Loïc Fürhoff on Unsplash