Theories for Changing Blindness

Theories for changing blindness

Gerardo Garcia

Theories for changing blindness

Changes in visual perception are called changing blindness, it’s the phenomenon when a person is looking at a particular scene and unable to distinguish these scenes with one or an abundant amount of items changing in the scene. There are limitations to this phenomenon that do not allow us to absorb or encode the information of these scenes in order for change blindness to occur there must be a sudden change or some type of disruption like a blink or a movement. To better understand change blindness, one must perceive scenes with the intent to have a better visual memory from scene to scene and absorb the changes that are happening during the visualization of the scenes.

There are two components that are critical to the change blindness concept; these two components are using visual transients and encoded scenes in memory. These visual transients can be anything from using moving objects to a visual stimulation near an object or even blinking the object to cause confusion in fading the image of a luminated object in low contrast also known as the (Troxler effect). When talking about encoded scenes in memory, position or presence of an object are better representations in a scene as opposed to surface properties such as colors or textures on surfaces. Surface properties are considered primary only when shape and relational information is not sufficiently informative for fast identification of an object or scene or when surface properties are particularly diagnostic in identifying objects such as fruits or animals (Biederman & Ju, 1988; Price & Humphreys, 1989).

 Summarizing the basic comparison of visual transients of position or presence and absence to surface properties, the color changes produced more changes in the configuration of a scene. These comparison results suggest that independence of color does not stand out in how the scene is represented and is also a dominant property as opposed to position or presence and absence. However, it’s possible that although color enhancing does bring up a difference in the template representation that will be perceived first hand as a translation in visual perception. Perhaps, color-related changes in the initial observation of a scene will influence performance in a task, which comes hand in hand into early scene processing and recognition.

“The basic problem is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly analyze and still end up with a reasonable sized brain, Our spotlight of attention is grabbing objects at such a fast rate that introspectively it feels like you’re recognizing many things at once, but the reality is that you are only accurately representing the state of one or a few objects at any given moment as for the rest of our visual experience,  it has been aptly called a grand illusion (Dr. Jeremy Wolfe)”.

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