Are we deaf to change blindness? A growing number of automobile accidents are caused by a driver attending to a secondary tasks, for example, talking on the phone, adjusting the radio and text messaging. When sudden changes in traffic occur cognitive attention is necessary to take appropriate action (States, 2001). Yet many people overestimate the capacity of their visual attention necessary to perceive a change (Levin, Momen, Drivdhal, & Simons, 2000). Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark argue that attention is a limited resource and necessary to perceive change (1997). Visual distractions and change blindness can hijack a person's attention making change perception more difficult (Grimes, 1996). Change blindness is a phenomenon where a person fails …show more content…
to detect a change in their visual environment and the biggest factor is attention (Simon & Levin, 1997). Does limited attention moderate the effect of cognitive and visual distractions on a change detection task. Attention functions as a controlled process most of the time but can function as an automatic process after repeating an operation many times (Davis, Loftus, Vanous, & Cucciare, 2007). For example after many years driving an automobile becomes a process that does not require much effort and often can be done while attending to multiple types of stimuli, for example, auditory and visual stimuli (Treisman & Geffen, 1967). On the other hand a large amount of the driving process goes beyond mere operation and involves paying attention to change. Change detection experiments using the mudsplash and flicker paradygm have demonstrated, under normal conditions we are able to perceive changes, but when change blindness occurs the process has been disrupted and prevented from change perception (Rensink et al., 1997). The flicker paradigm is a change detection task using pairs of images, One of the images contains a small object that is changed in some way. When the images are flashed at a high speed the effects are similar to natural eye saccade movements (Blackmore, Brelstaff, Nelson, & Troscianko, 1990). Rensink took that design further by dividing each pair of images by a blank screen he found that participants took longer to detect a change in a scene (1995). The blank screen disrupted the process of attention encoding any of the unchanged scene into memory and instead this stimuli was eliminated by the blank screen (Loftus, Vanous, & Cucciare, 2008). Similarly drivers experience change blindness from transient flashes of light from the sun or reflections from other cars. To examine change blindness in a condition similar to what a driver experiences the mudsplash paradygm is used. The design is the same as the flicker paradygm but instead of the blank screen there are small high contrast shapes scattered across the scene with the change (O’Regan et al. 1999). Visual disruptions and distractions have a negative influence on the limited attentional process requiring more cognitive effort to detect change in an environment (Wolfe, Reinecke, & Brawn, 2006). In other words, attention was necessary for completing the process of encoding the stimuli to short term visual memory or the stimuli was quickly overwritten. Change blindness is caused by a distraction or disruption of attention and as a result the necessary stimuli is missing from short term memory (Johnson & Spencer, 2010). Subsequently a driver with change blindness could experience a decrease in driving performance (Lee & Boyle, 2007). Attention is automatically drawn to a loud noise or a bright light (Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 1997) and moving objects in the visual stream are easily detected because the movement in the visual field changes the light and color on the retina of the eye (Gallace, Tan, Spence, &, 2007), and this is what our attention is quickly alerted to (Johnson & Spencer, 2010). Incidentally, a disruption of the retinal image from an unintended or too many visual transients can cause change blindness (Kleene & Michel, 2014). In one study they suggested attention processed sound similarly because without auditory attention very little stimuli is heard (Cherry, 1969). Although research on change blindness has demonstrated that change detection is faster when visual and auditory stimuli are within the same context.
Research is sparce on the capacity of attention in a multtask environment. This raises an important question as to what is happening with our attentional system when change blindness occurs. Consequently, There are few studies that explore how auditory and visual stimuli share attention and whether un-related auditory processing could undermine a visual change detection task. Additionally, auditory distractions may prove to have a bigger impact on driving than previously thought. At the very least this study is intended to provide individuals with a convincing argument against using their smart phone while driving an automobile and provide support to similar research studies. More research is necessary to further convince drivers the nature of attentional limitations and change blindness on the road. The present study examines a person’s ability to detect change when their cognitive attention is disrupted by an auditory shadowing task. Our first hypothesis predicts that as the level of mud splash is increased, the reaction time to detect change in a scene will increase. Similar results will be found when the experimental condition adds a low level audio and verbal shadowing
task.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
In 1995, a Boston police officer responded to a 911 call regarding a shooting. Spotting a potential suspect he gave chase. During the pursuit the officer ran by an assault in progress without stopping to assist the victim. Later, he would claim that he never saw the assault because he was focused on chasing his suspect (Chabris, Weinberger, Fontaine & Simmons, 2011). This is an example of inattentional blindness or the failure to perceive objects or events when attention is focused elsewhere (Mack & Rock, 1998). Parents distracted by children, teenagers talking on cellphones and even professionals trained to be observant of their environment can fall prey to this phenomenon. Though people are not susceptible to inattentional blindness to the same degree, it is feasible that some may be less susceptible due to difficulties staying focused on a task at hand. This paper will examine the possibility that elderly people are less susceptible to inattentional blindness due to a decrease in attention skills.
Classical theories demonstrating the inattentional blindness paradigm are (1) the perceptual load, (2) inattentional amnesia and (3) expectation.
Seppa, Nathan. “Impactful Distraction: Talking While Driving Poses Dangers that Drivers Seem Unable to See.” Science News 184.4 (2013):20-24.Readers Guide Full Text Mega. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.
Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness to dynamic events, contrary to popular belief, is not about gorillas in the zoo. The entire article is a focus upon inattentional blindness, which is a lot more common in situations than one would believe. The focus of inattentional blindness is brought on by a study that includes many volunteers, mainly undergraduate students, in the attempt to point out that one can be so focused on one thing that they could completely miss a gorilla coming into the room, or some other obscure factor that occurs without anyone noticing. Through multiple sessions of differentiating experiments, Daniel J. Simmons and Christopher F. Chabris from Harvard University were able to produce further insights into inattentional blindness.
The Element of Blindness: Failure to see clearly alters the perception of an event and limits one’s knowledge of their surroundings. Nothing is what it seems, causing an inconsistency in the truth which leads one to question the vision. Everything then becomes twisted and not what it seems, causing an inconsistency of the truth and leading one to doubt their vision. This scenario can be compared to the recurring theme in Ralph Ellison’s, The Invisible Man. Throughout the novel, nothing is ever quite as it seems to the narrator as he struggles to understand the truth about society and ultimately himself.
Our attention is very selective when it comes to getting information from our environment. We could be looking at everything within our environment and miss changes that occur while looking. According to Rensink, O’Regan and Clark (1997), attention is a key factor, meaning when our attention is focused on the area of change then change can be detected. When we fail to detect change, it can result in change blindness. In support of this idea, Simons and Levin (1998) suggest that change blindness occurs if there is a lack of “precise” visual representation of their surroundings. In other words, a person can be looking at an object and not fully notice a change.
We as human beings utilize the five senses to process information about our surroundings. These senses help keep us safe. For example, we use our sense of touch to avoid picking up a hot pan, while our senses of smell and taste prevent us from cooking any rotten food in the pan. Our sense of sight allows us to see an oncoming train, while our sense of sound makes it possible to hear the train’s horn.
A popular subject within psychology is that of selective attention, particularly visual, auditory or visual and auditory attention (Driver, 2001). There are many theories of visual and auditory attention that provide us with a greater understanding of the ways in which humans attend to different stimuli (Driver, 2001), such as Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention for example. This essay will compare and contrast theories of visual and auditory attention as well as discussing how well these theories explain how we attend to objects. The essay will consist of three auditory attention theories of Broadbent’s filter theory, Treisman’s (1964) attenuation theory, and Deutsch and Deutsch’s (1963) late selection model of attention; and two models of visual attention known as the spotlight model, such as Treisman and Gelade’s (1980) feature integration model, and the zoom-lens model of visual attention (see Styles, 2006).
Ari Brace Mr. Liepa Honors Global Literature 4 May 2014 Adapting to Change Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, is a story about a society on the verge of a cultural change. The main character, Okonkwo, is driven throughout the story by fear and a drive for success. He relied on the village of Umuofia to stay the same because he used the structured culture to feel safe and appreciated. He lives in a constant state of fear because he wants to find his own meaning in life.
These technologies have made driving an easier and enjoyable experience, as well as reducing our chances of getting into accidents. The research presented in the following article “Driven to Distraction [in car technology]” provided surprising conclusions. Professor John D. Lee from the University of Iowa states the following issue: “Technology is changing very quickly. Many of these things coming into the car were not designed to be used in it. ”(Edwards 8).
An area of everyday experience where divided attention is very relevant is the question of whether we can drive and talk on a mobile phone at the same time. The answer is a quite obvious ‘yes’ but the argument is that when doing this we put ourselves and others in danger because we’re not very good at it. We struggle to attend to both tasks simultaneously and to carry them out effectively. Our attentional capacity is being exceeded, often with catastrophic results (Strayer & Johnston, 2001).
I am the kind of person who likes to be in an environment that doesn’t change to often. I’m not a fan of jumping into something new. Adapting to change is one of the hardest things for me and it is the one thing that I need to work on the most. Change happens all around us every day and I need to learn how to deal with it. Change can be good. Change can be bad. It’s just what I’m going to have to work on to become a better leader.
Nevertheless, hands-free phones are just as disturbing as hand held phones. They both serve the same purpose when it comes to distracting the driver from state of the road. Thus, hand held devices do not increase safety, and I have observed this when using the cell phones as I drive. At the same time, I have noticed that my reaction time significantly reduced, and I almost caused an accident. When I look at this slow reaction, I compare it to that of an old...
The main distraction of driving is cell phones. Most adults and teens will engage in texting and driving. Due to the major issue of texting and driving many campaigns have been launched, one being launched by AT&T “when it comes to texting and driving, it can wait.” This campaign has many drivers take the pledge to no longer use their phone when driving, there is an available app that will send out automatic messages to anybody that sends a while the individual is driving. When someone is driving at the rate of 55 miles per hour for only 4.6 seconds, it will equal the length of a football field, 100 yards. So, even stopping full vision from the road for a few seconds will still risk serious danger. Another cause of distracted driving is being exhausted or tired, doing so will cause a much slower reaction time. The slower reaction time causes many of the accidents that happen when people are tired. Another possibility is falling asleep behind the wheel even for a few seconds you could drift, or swerv into another lane and hit another car causing a major or fatal car accident. When taking driving classes, the students within the class will hear the saying “stay alert, stay alive.” The final major distraction of driving is eating and drinking. One of the problems of eating and drinking while driving is that it causes both a visual and manual distraction. When removing your eyes from the road many dangers will be