Experimental Psychology - Change Blindness

A special case of information-selection by the human cognitive system. The brain seems to select the information worth to process, or most relevant, at every instant, in almost every context. This might produce some very specific phenomena such as what psychologists call "Change Blindness". (FB)
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Such kind of experiments try to show the limits of our capacity to encode, retain, and compare visual information from one glance to the next.
This suggests, among other issues, that our awareness of our visual surroundings is far more sparse than most people intuitively believe. (FB)

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  Education

[jackyan22]

How are these "large changes?". We don't notice the difference because 1: they present no immediate threat, 2: the general shape of the humans do not change. Try putting a clown instead of another man and I guarantee that EVERYONE will notice.

[Fabrizio Bonacci]

I'm afraid your assumptions do not take into account the core of the argument discussed in those experiments: (a) Brain resources are LIMITED, thus (b) we cannot process all the information we are constantly exposed to, at any given instant, hence (c) our brains select the information worth to process. An input worth to process is a piece of information which produces some cognitive effects in the context of assumptions of the brain, at a given instant.

[Mardrommen]

Now, how many of you noticed that the first time Prof Daniel J Simons appeared he wore a red shirt, but the next time he appeared his shirt was blue? ;)

[YouPhuk]

If you put two women and changed them i'm sure the guys would notice.

[Jeff Travilla]

This isn't surprising. The human brain is constantly filling in gaps in perception to complete the whole picture and always fighting to remove inconsistencies in perception, emotion and reason. It's just another example of cognitive dissonance at work.

[Dallasgeri1]

3:54 No shit sherlock

[Holycamlot]

Cool, I guess that mist thing in the Percy Jackson novels could actually work.

[Holycamlot]

I also watched that video, I got both the white throws (15 btw) and saw that gorilla on the first try.

[bigi5151]

The two person that recognized that the guy has changed were girls, this might be because they may have looked with an interested look at the first guy, this way it'd be fast to recognize the different face, hair color, eyes, etc.

[Flavia Martins]

please, what is the name of the documentary?

[IlVeritiero]

maybe it's the cognitive effort of compiling the module that makes the brain save up some resources.... I mean if the first experimenter would just chat with the test subject about easy subjects, then ducked for a second and the second experiment came up, the test subjects would notice immediatly. It reminds me of that gorilla video. The brain focuses on counting the subjects and shuts down other superfluos input. More like a feature I mean, it's just focusing or the mind on autopilot

[Vangelis Michalopoulos]

People tend to focus on people who belong to the same group

[pismo10]

Maybe nobody cares because it is not relevent to what they are doing. They may notice but so what...