Essay On Change Blindness

Over the past few months, we have conducted an experiment studying how change blindness effects the short-term memory of students in our school. Change blindness is defined as, “the surprising difficulty observers have in noticing large changes to visual scenes” (http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/f/change-blindness.htm). It is a phenomenon that has gained national attention and bewilderment, and we decided to test it out on our fellow classmates to see how they fared. We began our experiment by filming a video displaying various examples of change blindness. The changes we made included three people putting on and taking off hats a total of four times, a change in the type of car featured in the video, a fallen cereal box in …show more content…
We also had twenty-seven inconclusive answers, so we combined them and labeled them inconclusive in the graph above. As we already stated, we believe the change in cars to be one of the harder changes we made in the video, so we are excited that fifteen percent of those surveyed got if right as we anticipated a smaller percentage when we created this experiment. Change blindness is evident in this question and the answers given because the brain was preoccupied with many other factors of the video, and it was rather difficult to catch a change in the car featured. The third question we asked on the survey was, “Were there any changes with the cups?” This question is the only trick question we asked, because there were not changes with the cups we used in the video; however, many students answered yes, and quite a few even continued on to explain what those changes were, with the main two changes made up being a change in cup color or cup