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vision
Your brain creates a false sense of visual continuity.
The 'flicker paradigm' reveals that people often fail to notice massive changes in a scene if they occur during a brief flicker.
The brain does not store a detailed, frame-by-frame image of your environment. Instead, it maintains a skeletal gist and fills in the rest with assumptions based on past experience. When the scene flickers, your brain's memory of the 'gist' overrides the actual visual update, masking the change.
What you see is a reconstruction, not a recording.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Rensink et al., 1997, Psychological Science
- What the check found
- Rensink, O'Regan, and Clark (1997) is the primary study that established the flicker paradigm. The lack of quote is due to the provided reference material not referencing this specific paper.
- 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.