Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction

Abstract

Recent research on change detection has documented surprising failures to detect visual changes oc-curring between views of a scene, suggesting the possibility that visual representations contain few de-tails. Although these studies convincingly demonstrate change blindness for objects in still images and motion pictures, they may not adequately assess the capacity to represent objects in the real world. Here we examine and reject the possibility that change blindness in previous studies resulted from pas-sive viewing of 2-Ddisplays. In one experiment, an experimenter initiated a conversation with a pedes-trian, and during the interaction, he was surreptitiously replaced by a different experimenter. Only half of the pedestrians detected the change. Furthermore, successful detection depended on social group membership; pedestrians from the same social group as the experimenters detected the change but those from a different social group did not. A second experiment further examined the importance of this effect of social group. Provided that the meaning of the scene is unchanged, changes to attended objects can escape detection even when they occur during a natural, real-world interaction. The dis-cussion provides a set of guidelines and suggestions for future research on change blindness. Despite our impression that we retain the visual details of our surroundings from one view to the next, we are surprisingly unable to detect changes to such details. Re-cently, experiments from a number of laboratories have shown that people fail to detect substantial changes to pho-tographs of objects and real-world scenes when the abil-ity to detect retinal differences is eliminated (Blackmore,