Change Blindness

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Change blindness is defined as the inability to recognize changes that occur with visual stimuli. We automatically assume that when we look at something (our surroundings) we have properly encoded every intricate detail of it, however this is not true. It has been proven that it’s actually quite difficult for a person to be able to distinguish the differences in visual stimuli even when they are told that they will have to find the differences in their surroundings, despite the number of changes. Such inabilities have been attributed to attention. Attention is more than what we are looking at, but how we actively process specific information in the environment that is necessary in order to perceive changes in our environment. (James, 1890) Despite its heavily scientific background change blindness is an important issue because of its applicability to everyday life with such …show more content…
However, change blindness affects you more than you think. There are two major examples of when change blindness becomes important in our everyday lives, in traffic situations as well as during medical screenings. (Sternberg, Robert Ch.4, p.165) Medical screening can be life threatening as well as lifesaving, since these screenings are the things that medical professionals rely on to determine what is going on within a person’s body. Depending on a few small cues, they may be able to determine what is abnormally occurring. Also, another important aspect of everyday lives is traffic, whether you drive or not you are affected by traffic. Driving is already a divided attention task because you must pay attention to the road, your speed, road signs, and other drivers, and so on it is rather easy to look away from the road a minute and rear end the car in front of you, or run a stop sign because you accidently overlooked