Monday, May 4, 2009

Change Blindness

I looked at some of the neuropsychology links that were posted a few weeks ago and found the change blindness examples very amusing. "In this clip, an experimenter approached a pedestrian to ask for directions. While the pedestrian was providing directions, two additional experimenters rudely passed between the initial experimenter and the pedestrian. During this brief interruption, the original experimenter was replaced by a different person. Even though the experimenters looked quite different and had distinctly different voices, approximately 50 percent of the subjects failed to notice that they were talking to a different person after the door passed."

When I first watched this I laughed because it is amusing how clueless the person providing directions was to the whole thing, but I think I would've just as easily mistaken the 2 people for the same person. I know when I work retail I have made the mistake a few times where while answering a costumer's question I'll be interrupted and will return to answer the question only to find out that I'm talking to the wrong costumer. To avoid this embarrassment I have learned to pay closer attention to people, but I feel like this door trick would've fooled me too.

I also watched a few other videos provided on the website, most of them were videos where slight changes were made to a scene either during cuts, or some where pictures where something would slowly change color over the minute or so that I was watching it. I consider myself fairly observant to the visual aspects of movies, so I thought that I'd be able to notice most of the differences, especially because I was aware that the details in the scene were going to change. Much to my surprise, I missed most of the changes and found myself looking at each video a few times to find all the changes. These videos showed me how we take in and process information and scenarios, we're most likely going to take in the whole larger picture than to notice what color shirt someone is wearing. However, the inattentional blindness where you're asked to count how many passes the white team makes, demonstrates something different: when we are given a task to focus on, we may lose sight and neglect other aspects of the scene. 

4 comments:

SHaKiEra said...

I just wanted to comment because there is something interesting that see everyday that has to do with blindness. There is this older man who rides the train everyday back home with me. He is completely blind and he walks with the guiding stick. I think its so fascinating how someone can do that and know exactly how to cross streets, he knows exactly where he is going without any trouble. He obviously has to have been doing this for years.

Mark Nonato said...

I watched the video where in each cut there was a change, and after reading about the changes, I looked superhard at the small details and even though I found more than 2 changes, I did see a change in each cut, but I wasn't able to see at least 9, but maybe after a couple of more views of the clip I will get them all, but very interesting study on how we don't really notice or pay attention to detail and I have had a similar situation working in retail once where I have went up to a customer twice after already helping them and not realizing that I had already helped them, but in other situations I am very attentive to small details, I guess sometimes are brains shut off and we don't really pay attention.

Danielle Heard said...

I found this article very interesting because it shows how we as humans do not pay attention to details at times. Which can be very dangerous at times. The man in this video didnt even notice that he was talking to a totally different person. We focus only at the task at hand and never pay attention to the little things that can be very important.

Danielle Heard said...
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