'Change Blindness' something we apparently all suffer from.

Artist’s impression of the dwarf planet Eris

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What is change blindness?

Recently a number of studies have shown that under certain circumstances, very large changes can be made in a picture without observers noticing them. What characterizes the experiments showing such "Change Blindness" in visual scenes is the fact that the changes are arranged to occur simultaneously with some kind of extraneous, brief disruption in visual continuity, such as the large retinal disturbance produced by an eye saccade,

- a rapid, jerky movement of the eyes between positions of rest,  a shift of the picture, a brief flicker, a "mudsplash", an eye blink, or a film cut in a motion picture sequence. These phenomena are attracting an increasing amount of attention from experimental psychologists and from philosophers, because they suggest that humans' internal representation of the visual world is much sparser than usually thought.

In visual perception, change blindness is a normal phenomenon of the brain which show in light that the brain does not have a precise representation of the world but a lacunar one, made of partial details. Despite the name, this phenomenon does not affect the eyes but the brain, and as such is bound to happen to all the human senses. This phenomenon is still in research, but results suggests that the brain estimates the importance and usefulness of informations prior to deciding to store them or not. Another issue is that the brain cannot see a change happening to an element that it has not yet stored.


There are many demonstrations of 'change blindness' on the Internet but as they contain flashing imagery I have chosen nnot to put them up on these pages.