Theories Cognitive Psychology Why Change Blindness Happens Examples and Coping Strategies By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book." Learn about our editorial process Updated on December 02, 2023 Fact checked Verywell Mind content is rigorously reviewed by a team of qualified and experienced fact checkers. Fact checkers review articles for factual accuracy, relevance, and timeliness. We rely on the most current and reputable sources, which are cited in the text and listed at the bottom of each article. Content is fact checked after it has been edited and before publication. Learn more. by Emily Swaim Fact checked by Emily Swaim Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell. Learn about our editorial process Print Tetra Images/Getty Images Table of Contents View All Table of Contents Research Causes In the Real World Trending Videos Close this video player 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. Many fascinating experiments have explored aspects of this phenomenon, such as: How changing the direction of a stimulus induces change blindness, which might explain how many magic tricks work.Whether people noticed—or did not notice—changes in type, distance, complexity, and field of view in an immersive environment. They found that people with good working memories were more apt to notice them than were their more forgetful counterparts.How strength and stability of a stimulus can help you perceive changeWhether a brief break between one version of an image and another would make changes more difficult to detect.Whether participants would notice that their conversation partners had been swapped out for others after a period of distraction. Causes of Change Blindness If the ability to perceive change is so important, why do humans often fail to notice even major ones? Researchers have a few ideas. Focused Attention and Limited Resources At this moment, your attention is focused on the words you are reading. Are you giving any attention to the color of the nearby wall? Are you aware of the position of your feet? Until now, you probably weren't paying attention to either of those things. According to researchers Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin, that's because your limited capacity for attention forces you to choose what to focus on. Lots of information simply passes us by because we lack the resources to attend to it. 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. One reason people think they would see the changes may be that they know from past experiences that changes that occur in real life are usually easy to see. But there is an important difference between changes that occur in real life and those that occur in change detection experiments. Changes that occur in real life are often accompanied by a motion, which provides a clue that indicates a change is occurring. Other Factors Other factors that can influence change blindness include attention, age, presentation, and the use of psychoactive drugs. Researchers have also found that distraction increases change blindness. Age can also play a role: studies have found that older people are less likely to detect changes in a visual scene than younger people. Again, the ability to take in visual information is constrained by limited resources. 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. 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: Air Traffic Control. A disaster could result if an air traffic controller failed to detect changes when monitoring takeoffs, landings, and flight paths.Driving. Failure to detect changes in the environment while you are driving can lead to dire consequences. Distractions such as talking on the phone or texting while you drive can decrease attention and increase change blindness.Eyewitness Testimony. Change blindness can affect an eyewitness's ability to recount the details of a crime or to correctly identify the perpetrator.Social Interactions. Change blindness can affect day-to-day social interactions—for example, asking the wrong waiter for the check when you're dining out. 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 our editorial process to 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. Yao R, Wood K, Simons DJ. As if by magic: An abrupt change in motion direction induces change blindness. Psychol Sci. 2019;30(3):436-443. doi:10.1177/0956797618822969 Martin D, Sun X, Gutierrez D, Masia B. A study of change blindness in immersive environments. IEEE Trans Visual Comput Graphics. 2023;29(5):2446-2455. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2023.3247102 Andermane N, Bosten JM, Seth AK, Ward J. Individual differences in change blindness are predicted by the strength and stability of visual representations. Neuroscience of Consciousness. 2019;2019(1). 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 By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book." See Our Editorial Process Meet Our Review Board Share Feedback Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! What is your feedback? Helpful Report an Error Other Submit