Change blindness refers to the surprising difficulty that observers have in noticing small or even significant changes to immediate visual scenes. It is a cognitive process that researchers have described as surprising. This is because, in most cases, the changes in the visual field may seem so dramatic for one to miss them. However, when people's attention shifts, they miss both major and minor changes that occur right in front of them. There are clear reasons why change blindness happens, and it affects how we perceive and interact with the world around us. It affects how we also end up adopting and perceiving a particular culture and existing traditions.
The article" Culture and Change Blindness" was written by Masuda and Nisbett in 2006. It establishes the relationship that exists between different cultures and change blindness. The article is based on research done on perception and cognition. Different cultures have different views and perceptions about the world. For instance, westerners have an analytical way of viewing the world, which focuses on attributes of salient objects (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006) . On the other hand, East Asians have a holistic view, focusing on the entire field and relations among objects. The article examines these propositions in the change-blindness paradigm.
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According to Masuda and Nisbett (2006), American participants were found to be more sensitive to alterations in central objects compared to changes in the periphery. On the contrary, this was believed to be less true for East Asians, who would be more sensitive to periphery changes than focal changes. Participants were presented with still photos and with animated vignettes that had changes in focal object information and contextual information. It was established that East Asians were more sensitive to contextual changes than to focal object changes, compared to Americans. These results suggest that there can be cultural variation in what may seem to be basic perceptual processes. Change blindness evidently can lead to cultural variations.
The second article, "Age-related decline of visual processing components in change detection," was written in 2010 by Costello and other researchers. The article explains how a change in age affects the ability to detect significant changes in one’s immediate environment. Previous research studies have proved that age-related decline in change detection could partly be caused by older people adopting a rather conservative response criterion. This particular finding shows that there were some methodological limitations based on the change detection design. The design entailed displaying an image continuously until a change would be detected (Costello et al., 2010) . In their study, the researchers conducted two experiments in which they assessed adult age differences and set up a version of change detection that showed a response after each pre-change and post-change display. This worked on minimizing the limitations of the earlier response criterion. According to the research, younger adults performed better than older adults who were prone to committing more errors. In addition to that, the older adults had to use a greater number of display cycles for correct detection. After checking the elementary perceptual speed, there was a substantial reduction in those age-related performance declines. Costello et al. (2010) explain that aging causes a decrease in detection efficiency, which is largely attributed to low processing speed.
The article “ Change blindness and inattentional blindness ” was written by Jensen and other authors in 2011. This article uses existing research to establish the real cause of change blindness and how it affects people. Kendra starts off by attempting to explain what the phenomenon is. She asserts that while people think that they are aware of significant changes that happen in their close environment, there still exists too much information for the brain to fully process. The article then focuses on some fascinating experiments that explored this particular area of interest. The first one was Blackmore, Belstaff, Nelson, and Troscianko experiment carried out in 1995. It entailed participants being shown an image that was later changed during a brief blank interval in the visual scene. The researchers established that the participants had a hard time detecting those particular changes.
Such similar experiments, including those done by Simons and Levis (1998) and O’Regan et al. (1999), prove that this phenomenon is evident. According to the article, there are several causes of change blindness. First, it can be attributed to the limited attention that people tend to have. They choose what to focus on, which can only be a limited number of objects at a time. Secondly, there is the aspect of our expectations and past experiences. Past experiences may make people believe that certain changes usually never occur, and as such, people may fail to notice them when they actually occur. Change blindness might also result in problems in the real-world setup. For instance, when driving, failure to notice changes in the environment might lead to fatal accidents.
In conclusion, change blindness has its effect on several real-world situations. The phenomenon can be explained as a cognitive one that varies from one person to another. With all the research done on this phenomenon, there is still a need to establish how other cultures are affected by this perception and cognitive process.
References
Costello, M. C., Madden, D. J., Mitroff, S. R., & Whiting, W. L. (2010). Age-related decline of visual processing components in change detection. Psychology and Aging , 25 (2), 356-368. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017625
Jensen, M. S., Yao, R., Street, W. N., & Simons, D. J. (2011). Change blindness and inattentional blindness. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science , 2 (5), 529-546. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.130
Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2006). Culture and change blindness. Cognitive Science , 30 (2), 381-399. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0000_63
