What is the difference between inattentional blindness and change blindness

Some recent studies have demonstrated failures to notice objects that occur on many trials due to attentional engagement on a primary task. In such cases, the critical objects are expected, but observers fail to report them because they are engaged in another task. Although such failures of awareness can be attributed to attentional engagement, they do not precisely constitute examples of inattentional blindness.

When a critical stimulus appears repeatedly during an experiment, observers do have a reason to look for it they will be asked about it. Consequently, it might be attended, just not sufficiently to produce awareness of it. Such failures of awareness might be due to insufficient attention rather than inattention.

The unexpected nature of the critical stimulus is what differentiates inattentional blindness from other failures of awareness due to distraction or attentional failures e.

Conclusions from studies of inattentional blindness are premised on the idea that a failure to report an unexpected stimulus results from a failure to see that stimulus. In principle, though, people might fail to report the unexpected stimulus even if they did see it — they could simply forget that they saw it by the time they are asked about it.

That is, they have inattentional amnesia rather than inattentional blindness Wolfe, Differentiating these alternatives might be impossible because questioning inherently occurs after the event, leaving open the possibility of forgetting. Whether or not the inattentional amnesia explanation is more plausible or palatable is a matter of debate.

For the amnesia account to hold, observers would have to consciously perceive the unexpected object and then forget that they saw it, something that might be less plausible when the unexpected object is particularly distinctive or unusual e. Another alternative to the inattentional blindness account is that observers see the critical object in the display but do not process it extensively and consequently do not retain it.

In essence, they experience inattentional agnosia see Simons, They might see that there is something in the display, but not identify it as a gorilla. In fact, they might not identify it as a coherent object at all. However, evidence that the critical object can prime a subsequent response suggests that it is processed to some extent, even when it is not reported.

Change blindness refers to the failure to notice something different about a display whereas inattentional blindness refers to a failure to see something present in a display. Although these two phenomena are related, they are also distinct. The signal for change detection is the difference between two displays, and neither display on its own can provide evidence that a change occurred.

In contrast, inattentional blindness refers to a failure to notice something about an individual display. The missed element does not require memory — people fail to notice that something is present in a display. In a sense, most inattentional blindness tasks could be construed as change blindness tasks by noting that people fail to see the introduction of the unexpected object a change — it was not present before and now it is.

However, inattentional blindness specifically refers to a failure to see the object altogether, not to a failure to compare the current state of a display to an earlier state stored in memory. Studies of inattentional blindness demonstrate that people fail to notice unexpected objects in a display. Or, more precisely, that they fail to report having noticed an unexpected object. The information from the unexpected object is filtered from awareness by the time people are asked about it.

However, it is unclear how much processing of the unexpected object occurs before this filtering. In its strongest form, the word "blindness" implies that the information is processed minimally if at all.

Namely, the comparison of real-world and on-screen viewing conditions, and the comparison of the 12 pairs of artefacts. Regarding the former, first, by comparing the performance of two different groups of participants in real-world and on-screen conditions, we introduced the potential for selection bias.

We saw no practicable alternative to this, as a change cannot be shown to the same participant more than once in a change blindness experiment. To mitigate this bias, we recruited over 30 participants that we randomly allocated to each group, which resulted in near-identical demographics being represented in both.

Second, while it was important to control the conditions in which the artefacts were observed, this was at the expense of the naturalism of the viewing experience. The viewing distance and placements of the objects were similar to what would be found in a natural museum environment, but the brief periods of observation and the removal of peripheral vision using modified goggles were both unnatural.

However, the conditions were the same for participants in both groups. Third, by recording changes which participants described incorrectly in the same way as changes that were not described at all, we set a relatively high threshold for change detection to be achieved.

Our methodology did not distinguish between the experience of completely missing a change and the experience of sensing that a change had occurred but not being able to describe that change correctly. It is also possible that the head movement of the real-world observer provides an extra attentional cue to the on-screen observer by centering on the change. Regarding the comparison between the 12 pairs of artefacts, first, it is possible that the performance of participants changed over the course of the experiment as they advanced through the 12 sets of observations.

It is both conceivable that their performance may have improved due to a learning effect, or conversely have worsened due to fatigue. We expect that because each observation was only brief less than 3 s , and the number of observations was relatively few, neither of these effects are likely to have impacted significantly on the levels of change blindness recorded over the course of the experiment.

Each set of 12 trials took less than 10 min to perform. Although the order in which the artefacts were viewed was not varied between participants which could have mitigated any such effects , the levels of change blindness produced from pair one to pair 12 bear no relation to either an increasing or decreasing trend.

Finally, the collection of artefacts used as visual stimuli did not contain a control pair, in that there was no pair of artefacts that were truly identical to each other. Change blindness is a testable phenomenon of visual perception that can be used to investigate the nature of visual perception in different conditions.

It has been produced in naturalistic scenarios outside of the laboratory before using everyday objects, but until now it has not been produced in a setting such a museum, where visual perception may be enhanced. We have for the first time demonstrated that change blindness can be produced inside a museum, using ancient museum artefacts as visual stimuli, under both real-world and on-screen viewing conditions. We anticipate further experiments will be required to fully investigate the notion of altered visual perception inside museums.

While in society, on-screen interactions are increasingly coming to replace real-world ones, there is a relative lack of experimental comparisons between visual perceptual performance in real-world and on-screen conditions. We have for the first time directly compared the levels of change blindness produced by a single set of visual stimuli viewed in both on-screen and real-world conditions, and found that there was no statistically significant difference between the levels of change blindness produced in the two conditions.

This does not appear to support our original hypothesis that change detection would be enhanced in real-world conditions relative to on-screen due to the perceptual advantages of binocular stereoscopic vision. We discuss the difficulty of interpreting this finding and caution against generalising the result of this experiment too readily. In light of this finding, we combined the data from both viewing conditions to identify groups of artefacts that were independently associated with high and low levels of change blindness, and found that change detection rates were influenced mainly by bottom-up factors, including the visible area and contrast of changes, more than top-down factors.

In this way, our findings support a role for bottom-up factors in determining which elements in a visual scene are represented and compared in the process of conscious change perception, in both real-world and on-screen viewing conditions. Finally we discuss the intrinsic limitations of this experiment which must be considered alongside its results. We hope, nevertheless, that our attempt to add to the understanding of visual perception within museums, the phenomenon of change blindness, perceptual performance in real-world and on-screen conditions, and the role bottom-up and top-down factors in change detection will motivate further research into these increasingly relevant questions.

JA and CAA analysed the data and prepared the figures. All authors contributed to and had approved the final manuscript. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We would like to thank all of our participants, whose enthusiasm and encouragement have been a great support to us throughout our work on this project.

We are also very grateful to the staff of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology for their generosity and guidance in making this unique experiment possible. This manuscript is dedicated to the memory of Professor GH. Albertazzi, L. Google Scholar. Ballard, D. Memory representations in natural tasks. Binder, M. Borji, A. State-of-the-art in visual attention modeling. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal.

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Eye movements during scene inspection: a test of the saliency map hypothesis. Varakin, D. Comparison and representation failures both cause real-world change blindness. Perception 36, — One of the best-known experiments demonstrating inattentional blindness is the "invisible gorilla test" carried out by Christopher Chabris, PhD, and Daniel Simons, PhD.

In this experiment, researchers asked participants to watch a video of people tossing a basketball, and the observers were told to count the number of passes or to keep track of the number of throws versus bounce passes.

Afterward, the participants were asked if they had noticed anything unusual while watching the video. But in reality, something odd had happened.

In some instances, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit strolled through the scene, turned to the camera, thumped her chest, and walked away. While it may seem impossible that the participants missed such a sight since their attention was focused elsewhere and on a demanding task, the gorilla basically became invisible.

Rather than focusing on every tiny detail in the world around us, we tend to concentrate on things that are most important, relying on our existing schemas to "fill in the blanks.

As our attentional, cognitive, and processing resources are limited, relying on schemas allows us to dedicate these resources to what matters most while still allowing us to have complete, seamless experiences. One of the reasons why people so often "miss the gorilla," so to speak, is simply because the stimulus does not fit into their idea of what a basketball game is supposed to look like.

A gorilla showing up in the middle of a basketball game is unlikely to happen in a real-world setting, so we are less likely to notice it.

It is essentially ruled out as a component that will help you better understand or carry out the task at hand. That said, while we do sometimes fail to miss things in the world around us, we are generally pretty good at noticing information that is relevant to us, such as a car speeding toward us or a deer jumping out of the trees into the road.

Of course, this is not always the case. There are certain factors that can affect inattentional blindness. In the original invisible gorilla experiment, the participants had to count the number of passes made by either the team in black or the team in white. We all experience inattentional blindness from time to time, such as in these potential situations:. Though it is not possible to avoid all instances of inattentional blindness, it's important to remember this very natural occurrence—particularly when you are in a disagreement with someone about the full scope of a situation.

Your brain is sophisticated enough to help you register and interpret visual cues that it thinks will provide you with the most value. But, in its efforts, visual information—both important and not—can sometimes get overlooked. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Attention capture, processing speed, and inattentional blindness.