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perception
You are blind to dramatic changes in your environment.
Change blindness is the failure to notice significant visual alterations during a brief interruption or distraction.
In a 1998 study, half of the pedestrians who stopped to give directions to an experimenter did not notice when the experimenter was replaced by a different person behind a moving board. Your brain creates a cohesive model of the world and ignores minor data mismatches.
You see what your brain expects, not what is there.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Daniel Simons, 1998
- What the check found
- The study described is the seminal 'door study' by Simons and Levin (1998). The claim is factually accurate regarding the phenomenon, though the source attribution is often simplified.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.