Change Blindness - 75% of us are oblivious

This is something which I find contradicts what most people believe regarding how "intelligent" they are. In fact most of us aren't really all that intelligent when it comes to noticing change.

What about you? Can you trust yourself?

Oh my.. I just can't imagine falling for this, but if 75% of people fall for this maybe I would.. I bet most people that see this video figure they wouldn't fall for it but the statistics paint another picture.

Originally posted by HunkaHunka
This is something which I find contradicts what most people believe regarding how "intelligent" they are. In fact most of us aren't really all that intelligent when it comes to noticing change.

i don't think it has anything to do with intelligence
it is all about AWARENESS

What about you? Can you trust yourself?

i try to keep self honest with self
but that's ONLY because i came to an understanding about awareness several years ago

and by that, what i mean is that i have no advantage over anyone else in this area - it's just that by knowing of this that i can make efforts

because it's also about self-deception and/or denial
as long as i don't convince myself that i don't NEED to keep self on my toes or that i'm beyond the danger of blind-spots, i'm far more able to avoid such things.

if that makes sense

and so now that i realize this tendency that all humans share, i am more able to self-check myself on it, by simply being aware.

so all i can honestly say is:

i am more aware now than when i was not aware of "awareness" and its role in our lives but its up to me to retain it rather than trust it

Hmmm, to me the girl at the beginning of that movie noticed there was a different person. She just didn't say anything but I see in her eyes that she did notice the difference. If they are saying that teh 25% who notice the change are only the ones who speak up about it, then THEY are the ones not noticing the change in people's expressions.

Why is this in paranormal?

It is an interesting video. Some professional psychological experimentation is designed not so much to find new knowledge, as to make new and dramatic demonstrations of what is already known. This video is in the latter category.

It has long been well known that in navigating through life, we are parsimonious with information processing, attending to a few features, extracting what we need to know on the fly. To do this successfully is, of course, an ability in its own right.

That is to say, however nice it is for the Buddha that he is "fully aware" of his environment, the rest of us are not sitting around on our butts all day in a dimly lit room with no furniture. The challenge of genuine human life is to process a changing environment on the fly.

So, the movie opens with a man posed under a sign that says "Experiment Here." Two of the subjects said that the sign reads "Experiment." One subject stated that he signed a form which he did not read. These reports establish the well-known phenomenon, and adaptive cognitive strategy, of feature extraction.

Meh, call it change blindness if you like, but the Harvard guy gives away the mapping between the two terms in his interview. "Maybe" whether you notice a change depends on which features you are relying upon. Yeah. Maybe.

There are some methodological problems with this demonstration, but what it depicts is so uncontroversial that I think it is harmless error. Nevertheless, the previous poster is correct, I think, that at least one of the subjects gave a Candid Camera double-take when she saw the switch. Afterwards, she dummied up about it.

Why dummy up? Because otherwise she would have volunteered that she thought she had dealt with two men, with no reason to think that that was even possible. She would sound like a nutcase. So, she kept it to herself, or maybe even internalized an edited encounter ("Hmm, that's not right, oh well, need to pay better attention in the future..." - as if it were her mistake).

I think this is harmless, though, since some of the other subjects did seem surprised. So, 75% may be an exaggeration, but the phenomenon is both real, and also the inevitable consequence of known facts about feature extraction.

I am a little bit concerned about the experimenters' manipulativeness of the grant-funding public in calling a human ability a sensory deficiency, a "blindness." That is sort of like calling having sex "celibacy failure."

Some people do exactly that, of course. But that doesn't make it sensible. It just tips off that the speaker has something to sell. Tsk, tsk.

[edit on 22-12-2009 by eight bits]

i beat you to this by about a week, but the thread received zero attention so i can see why you didn't catch it.

however the search feature is great, i make double post from time to time, but the search feature does keep it from happening about 90% of the time.

Dec 14th Thread on Change Blindness

More like, NOBODY CARES if it's a different person, not that they are unable to see the changes, they just don't care. And why would they?

This isn't a very good experiment.

[edit on 22-12-2009 by Zsaqulz78th]

Yea more awareness then intelligence.....


but this proves, though as long as something " seems " to be the same and as long as we are not " Focusing" on the specifics, we won't even notice the change...

So those of us that find things that are odd or notice certain changes of things , and then those people report them on ATS......And then people come in debunk..like what the hell is up with that?

So next time something comes on here with some evidence of something that you did not catch........don't throw it to the side because it's not what you saw or what you thought, maybe YOU were not being aware or maybe YOU were tricked , and maybe YOU are not as smart as you think you are...

Originally posted by Alaskan Man
i beat you to this by about a week, but the thread received zero attention so i can see why you didn't catch it.

however the search feature is great, i make double post from time to time, but the search feature does keep it from happening about 90% of the time.

Dec 14th Thread on Change Blindness

I searched on change blindness and nothing came up.

Originally posted by Alaskan Man
i beat you to this by about a week, but the thread received zero attention so i can see why you didn't catch it.

however the search feature is great, i make double post from time to time, but the search feature does keep it from happening about 90% of the time.

Dec 14th Thread on Change Blindness

Thanks HunkaHunka. I enjoyed watching that. And I could see how a lot of people would fall for that. Think back to the day you've just had. A lot of the time we run on 'auto pilot'. Day to day tasks are done without any thinking and we just get on with them almost like we are asleep.

[edit on 24-12-2009 by Lee_K]