Blackwell Reference Online

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Recent work on the psychology of scene perception demonstrates that perceivers may fail to notice substantial events or changes taking place in full view. Perceivers are normally sensitive to change-related flickers of movement (“transients”). “Change blindness” occurs when these transients fail to grab attention, either because they are masked (as when the entire picture is refreshed), or because there are no transients (as when the change occurs gradually) (see O'Regan forthcoming and Simons & Ambinder 2005 for recent reviews). A related phenomenon is “inattentional blindness” ( Mack & Rock 1998 ). In inattentional blindness, perceivers fail to notice features, events, or changes in full view because their attention is focused elsewhere. In a now famous demonstration, Simons and Chabris (1999) ask perceivers to pay attention to the manner in which a ball is passed among a group of players. Perceivers who are engaged in this task frequently fail to notice that a person in a gorilla suit is walking among the players! Other phenomena have been described recently that lend further support to the idea that our ability to perceive detail is vulnerable to disruption, such as repetition blindness ( Kanwisher 1987 ; Chun 1997 ) and the attentional blink ( Chun & Potter 1995 ). In this article I use the term “detail blindness” to refer to this class of phenomena. The question ... log in or subscribe to read full text