Table of ContentsView AllTable of ContentsResearchCausesIn the Real World

Table of ContentsView All

View All

Table of Contents

Research

Causes

In the Real World

Close

If something in your visual field were to change dramatically before your eyes, you would notice it immediately, right? Not necessarily. Your surroundings simply offer too much information for your brain to fully process, so you might miss even large changes. This phenomenon is known as change blindness. Here’s why change blindness happens.

Change blindness is “a phenomenon of visual attention in which changes to a visual scene may go unnoticed under certain circumstances, despite being clearly visible and possibly even in an attended location.”

Research on Change Blindness

The idea of change blindness isn’t new; in fact, researchers have studied it for decades. The ability to detect change plays an important role in daily life—helping you notice when a car drifts into your lane or a person enters a room. Manyfascinating experimentshave explored aspects of this phenomenon, such as:

Causes of Change Blindness

If the ability toperceivechange is so important, why do humans often fail to notice even major ones? Researchers have a few ideas.

Focused Attention and Limited Resources

Expectations and Experiences

Certain changes—particularly those that are artificially produced in an experimental lab—tend to go unnoticed because they’re unexpected. How often does a person suddenly turn into someone else, an object suddenly blink into existence, or a person’s shirt change color? These things simply don’t happen, so they’re typically overlooked when they’re staged for an experiment.

Other Factors

Other factors that can influence change blindness includeattention, age, presentation, and the use ofpsychoactive drugs. Researchers have also found that distraction increases change blindness.

The basic problem is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly analyze and still end up with a reasonable-sizedbrain.

To cope with an overwhelming amount of data, you focus on a single part of the environment that you deem important enough to process.

Change Blindness in the Real World

Change blindness might cause problems in real-world situations, such as:

A Word From Verywell

Humans rely on their ability to detect change. Yet the human brain sometimes lacks sufficient resources to focus on all the details when so much information floods it at any given moment. So, it directs attention to the most important stimuli and lets the rest go. The result: Change blindness.

11 Sources

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Herbranson WT.Change blindness. In: Vonk J, Shackelford T, eds.Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer International Publishing; 2019:1-4.

Blackmore SJ, Brelstaff G, Nelson K, Trościanko T.Is the richness of our visual world an illusion? Transsaccadic memory for complex scenes.Perception. 1995;24(9):1075-1081. doi:10.1068/p241075

Simons D, Levin D.Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction.Psychon Bull Rev. 1998;5(4):644-649. doi:10.3758/bf03208840

Goldstein E, Brockmole J.Sensation and Perception. 10th ed. Independence: Cengage; 2017.

Costello MC, Madden DJ, Mitroff SR, Whiting WL.Age-related decline of visual processing components in change detection.Psychol Aging. 2010;25(2):356-368. doi:10.1037/a0017625

Angier N.Blind to change, even as it stares us in the face.The New York Times. Published April 1, 2008.

Romer D, Lee Y, McDonald C, Winston F.Adolescence, attention allocation, and driving safely.Journal of Adolescent Health. 2014;54(S5):S6-S15. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2013.10.202

Nellson KJ, Laney C, Fowler NB, Knowles ED, Davis D, Loftus EF.Change blindness can cause mistaken eyewitness identification.Legal and Criminological Psychology.2011;16(1):62-74. doi:10.1348/135532509X482625

Meet Our Review Board

Share Feedback

Was this page helpful?Thanks for your feedback!What is your feedback?HelpfulReport an ErrorOtherSubmit

Was this page helpful?

Thanks for your feedback!

What is your feedback?HelpfulReport an ErrorOtherSubmit

What is your feedback?