Scholarly Commons

The Effect of Experience On The Prevalence of Change Blindness

Our research is examining the effects of a student’s science background on change blindness for scientific materials. Change blindness is a phenomenon in which individuals fail to notice changes to an image or scene, and research has shown that individuals can often have difficulty detecting even very large changes if there is a gap in the visual information. However, it has also been shown that relevant knowledge may decrease the chances of change blindness. Specifically, individuals with more experience or expertise in a particular field are often faster to notice changes made to images that relate to that field. For example, compared with chess novices, chess experts are more able to notice changes to the configuration of a chess board. In the current experiment, we are exploring the relationship between the neuroscience courses that a student has completed (including neuroscience, psychology and biology courses) and their ability to notice changes to neuroscience relevant images.