The Social Spotlight Increases Blindness to Change Blindness

The results of research on change blindness and the spotlight effect suggest that (a) others are unlikely to notice changes in our appearance and (b) we are likely to overestimate the extent to which others notice changes in our appearance. However, little research has directly addressed the latter possibility. In Study 1, target persons overestimated the extent to which observers noticed a change in their sweatshirt. In Study 2, observers who followed the target persons throughout the study overestimated the extent to which other observers noticed the change in the target persons' sweatshirt, but target persons' overestimations were significantly higher. The results suggest that the spotlight effect increases blindness to change blindness.     

情绪诱发的视盲：一种独特的功能性视盲

功能性视盲是指由于某种原因导致正常的视觉系统出现视觉觉察丧失的现象, 例如变化知盲、注意瞬脱等都属于功能性视盲。情绪诱发的视盲指的是一个与任务无关的情绪性刺激的呈现吸引了注意以致个体无法对快速呈现的靶刺激有所觉察的现象。与注意瞬脱特别是情绪性注意瞬脱相比, 情绪诱发的视盲是以情绪刺激为干扰刺激, 考察情绪刺激如何以自下而上的方式吸引注意并干扰靶刺激的加工, 因此有着自己的特点：它没有lag1节省现象, 也没有像注意瞬脱那样严格的时间窗口限制, 不受干扰刺激与靶刺激物理特征相似程度的限制, 在心理机制上属于早期知觉阶段的加工竞争等等。情绪诱发的视盲表明情绪对注意在时间和空间两个维度上都有吸引或干扰作用。未来可以从考察神经机制、了解影响因素等多方面深化此领域的研究。     

Change Blindness Blindness: The Metacognitive Error of Overestimating Change-detection Ability

Recent research has demonstrated that subjects fail to detect large between-view changes to natural and artificial scenes. Yet, most people (including psychologists) believe that they would detect the changes. We report two experiments documenting this metacognitive error. In Experiment 1, students in a large General Psychology class were asked if they thought they would notice the change in four different situations previously tested by Levin and Simons (1997) and Simons and Levin (1998). Most claimed that they would have noticed even relatively small changes that real observers rarely detected. In Experiment 2, subjects were tested individually and half were asked to predict whether someone else would detect the changes. Subjects again overestimated the degree to which changes would be detected, both by themselves and by others. We discuss possible reasons for these metacognitive errors including distorted beliefs about visual experience, change, and stability.     

Skilled Observation and Change Blindness: A Comparison of Law Enforcement and Student Samples

Some evidence suggests that expertise and observational skills training can reduce attentional errors, such as change blindness. Laypeople typically assume that law enforcement officers possess acute observational skills, but no research to date has compared law enforcement and lay samples on their susceptibility to change blindness. In the present study, student and law enforcement samples completed a change blindness task and attempted to identify the target(s) from four line‐ups. Law enforcement officers and students were equally susceptible to change blindness regarding the switch in the target's identity, but students were more likely than officers to detect changes in the target's clothing. Students also performed better on the line‐up task, overall, than officers. Additionally, whereas students' confidence was positively correlated with identification accuracy under some circumstances, officers' confidence was either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest some factors accounting for law enforcement officers' relatively poor performance on these tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intentionalism and Change Blindness

According to reductive intentionalism, the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is constituted by the experience's intentional (or representational) content. In this article I attempt to show that a phenomenon in visual perception called change blindness poses a problem for this doctrine. Specifically, I argue that phenomenal character is not sensitive, as it should be if reductive intentionalism is correct, to fine-grained variations in content. The standard anti-intentionalist strategy is to adduce putative cases in which phenomenal character varies despite sameness of content. This paper explores an alternative antiintentionalist tack, arguing, by way of a specific example involving change blindness, that content can vary despite sameness of phenomenal character.

Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: the case of Change Blindness Blindness

Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” (CB). They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” (CBB) is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their self-evaluations on two activity-dependent cues, namely search time and perceived success in prior trials. These cues were found to influence self-evaluation in two orthogonal ways: success-feedback influenced self-evaluation in a global, contextual way, presumably by recalibrating the norm of adequacy for the task. Search time influenced it in a local way, predicting the success of a given trial from its duration.     

Current Approaches to Change Blindness

Across saccades, blinks, blank screens, movie cuts, and other interruptions, observers fail to detect substantial changes to the visual details of objects and scenes. This inability to spot changes (“change blindness”) is the focus of this special issue of Visual Cognition. This introductory paper briefly reviews recent studies of change blindness, noting the relation of these findings to earlier research and discussing the inferences we can draw from them. Most explanations of change blindness assume that we fail to detect changes because the changed display masks or overwrites the initial display. Here I draw a distinction between intentional and incidental change detection tasks and consider how alternatives to the “overwriting” explanation may provide better explanations for change blindness.     

Well‐Being Blindness

Why are we still studying well‐being? We have a vested interest in understanding the good life, and the relevant data seem to be accessible to us all. The challenge is to explain why well‐being is one lasting philosophical topic among others in spite of our special epistemic relationship to it. This article argues that human nature renders us well‐being blind. On one side this is due to the heterogeneous nature of our interests. Some are directly mediated by conscious thought, others are not. Some are individualistically realized, others relationally. On the other side we suffer from cognitive biases that lead us to undervalue, indeed, to miss entirely, the important aspects of human life that do not depend on conscious attention. Consequently, there is reason to think that we shall never be satisfied with a theory of well‐being.     

Change Blindness and Eyewitness Testimony

The authors explored the relevance of research on change blindness to eyewitness identification and testimony under intentional and incidental memory conditions. Participants (N = 80, 40 men and 40 women) viewed a video enactment of a burglary in which the identity of the burglar changed at the halfway point of the film. Half of participants were briefed to remember the content, and the other half were not. All were tested for the recall of the content, awareness of the change, and ability to identify either or both of the burglars. Some 61% of participants did not notice the identity change. Rates of detection were significantly higher in participants in the intentional condition, who also recalled significantly more detail from the film. Awareness of change was also significantly related to content recall scores and accuracy of identification of both burglars. The results illustrate the interrelation between the eyewitness and change blindness literatures.     

Contextualism,Invariantism and Semantic Blindness

Epistemic contextualism, many critics argue, entails that ordinary speakers are blind to the fact that knowledge claims have context-sensitive truth conditions. This attribution of blindness, critics add, seriously undermines contextualism. I show that this criticism and, in general, discussions about the error theory entailed by contextualism, greatly underestimates the complexity and diversity of the data about ordinary speakers’ inter-contextual judgments, as well as the range of explanatory moves that are open to both invariantists and contextualists concerning such judgments. Contextualism does entail that some speakers suffer from semantic blindness; however, at its roots, this blindness concerns not the context-sensitivity of knowledge claims, but the question whether knowledge sentences possess context-independent truth conditions. I argue that this blindness should not be deemed problematic, but that invariantism entails an error theory that is, by comparison, much more troubling.     

愚昧是一种束缚

据几年前中国科协发布的《中国公众科学素养调查》数据分析,达到基本要求者只占1.4%,即在1000人中只有14个人具备了基本的科学素养。     

汉字多音字加工过程中的重复知盲效应

以汉语中的多音字为研究材料, 采用RSVP任务, 探讨重复知盲的发生水平。采用三因素混合设计。结果是重复情况、位置和呈现时间有主效应。重复状况和呈现时间有交互效应：完全重复条件下, 呈现时间为100 ms和200 ms时都会产生重复知盲, 但同音重复和不同音重复条件下, 只有在呈现时间为100 ms时才产生重复知盲效应。结果表明：1)刺激的重复性和呈现时间是产生重复知盲的重要条件; 2)重复知盲的产生并未上升到语义加工水平, 而是处于知觉加工水平。     

变化盲视的最新研究进展

变化盲视指观察者不能探测到客体或情境中的变化 ,是近十年以来认知心理学的研究热点之一。变化盲视可发生在各种实验条件下。例如 ,在扫视、眨眼、电影镜头切换时发生的变化以及真实情景的交互作用中发生的变化 ,观察者都有可能探测不到。本文介绍了近年来对于变化盲视的研究成果 ,包括经常使用的实验范式和对这个现象的解释等     

特殊的视错觉：运动诱导视盲

突显的静止目标被一定空间范围内运动背景所覆盖时, 人类会感受到静止目标消失再重现的发生, 这种视错觉现象叫做运动诱导视盲(motion-induced blindness, MIB)。该现象成因的理论解释主要有：注意竞争理论、知觉完型加工理论以及神经生理机制相关理论。作为特殊的视错觉现象, 该现象与其他盲视现象不同,主要是由客体识别过程中的知觉变化引起; 另一方面, 运动诱导视盲中“反知觉”现象的特殊性也是研究者关注的问题之一。神经生理机制层面的研究关注早期、晚期皮层在该现象发生时的变化, 采用眼动、脑电等技术对错觉现象发生时程进行测量与评估。文章在总结已有相关研究的基础上进一步指出今后可深入探索的研究方向有：MIB发生的深层机制、作为研究意识神经相关、无意识知觉加工等课题的工具、MIB中的意义性加工与认知冲突等。     

Perceptual Load Induces Inattentional Blindness in Drivers

Perceptual load theory states that the level of perceptual load in a task predicts the processing of task‐irrelevant information. High perceptual load has been shown to result in increased inattentional blindness; however, there is little evidence that this extends beyond artificial computer‐based tasks to real‐world behavior. In this study, we adapted a typical load‐blindness paradigm for use in a driving simulator. Forty‐two drivers performed a series of gap perception tasks where they judged if their vehicle could fit between two parked vehicles, with the task imposing either low or high perceptual load. Awareness for an unexpected pedestrian or animal at the side of the road was found to be significantly lower in the high perceptual load condition. This study is the first to demonstrate perceptual load effects on awareness in an applied setting and has important implications for road safety and future applied research on the perceptual load model.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reduced Repetition Blindness for One's Own Name

We report a series of studies demonstrating reduced repetition blindness (RB) for one's own name. Participants searched RSVP streams for their own name and another name, and reported how many times these names appeared in each stream. In half of the streams containing two names, the same name was repeated; in the other half, the two names were different. Half of the repetitions were the participant's own name, half were another name. The results showed large RB for the “other name” condition, and attenuated, but significant, RB for the “own name” condition. This reduction in RB for the participant's own name was found when participants searched for the target names among nouns, among other names, and when participants just detected the presence or absence of the second name. Reduced RB for one's own name helps to reduce previous uncertainty regarding the existence of lexical and conceptual RB for words.     

Blindness to alternative scenarios in evidence evaluation

In order to prevent miscarriages of justice, police, prosecution, and judges must remain open to alternative scenarios in which the suspect is in fact innocent. In recent years, however, several studies have delivered results suggesting that open‐mindedness is not always standard in criminal procedures. For example, Ask and Granhag (2005) found that police officers' estimation of the incriminating power of investigation findings was not affected by knowledge of an alternative suspect. The current first study replicated these findings in a mixed sample of police officers, district attorneys, and judges. In Study 2, this blindness to alternative scenarios did not emerge in a sample of university students. However, the estimation of the incriminating power of the evidence and the willingness to convict the primary suspect were predicted with the participants' confirmation proneness. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.