Change Blindness: A Review of Perception, Attention, and Memory in Visual Processing

Xiangrui Meng

doi:10.54691/abhwfg92

Authors

Xiangrui Meng

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54691/abhwfg92

Keywords:

Change blindness, visual perception, attention, memory, mental representation

Abstract

Change blindness refers to the failure to detect significant changes in a visual scene when they coincide with a global visual transient, such as a saccade or a brief blank screen. This phenomenon highlights critical limitations in the healthy human perceptual system and underscores the distinction between sensation and perception. This review synthesizes current literature on change blindness, examining its underlying mechanisms in relation to perception, attention, memory, and top-down processing. We explore how visual representations are formed, maintained, and compared across disruptions, emphasizing the roles of working memory and attentional allocation. Additionally, the relationship between change blindness and inattentional blindness is discussed, with a focus on how attention modulates conscious perception. Findings from seminal studies, including those using gaze-contingent displays and dynamic stimuli, are integrated to illustrate how change blindness informs broader theories of visual cognition. The review concludes that change blindness is not merely a perceptual failure but a window into high-level cognitive processes, offering significant implications for understanding the architecture of visual awareness.

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