the effect of position of change and perceptual load on change blindness (Research Paper Sample)

THE EFFECT OF POSITION OF CHANGE AND PERCEPTUAL LOAD ON CHANGE BLINDNESS <Author name> <Institutional affiliation> <Course number and name> <Instructor name> <Assignment due date> The Effect of Position of Change and Perceptual Load on Change Blindness Literature Review Errors in perception have been singled out by previous research as a major cause of traffic accidents. However, the reason for the occurrence of these errors is not clearly understood. Looking but failing to see is one of the identified errors of perception. The difficulty in understanding this reason can be explained by a driver having actively searched a visual scene, fixated on a stimulus, and yet failed to process it. There are various suggestions for the occurrence of this phenomenon including drivers experiencing time gaps, highways hypnosis, or issues with a driver's attention mode (Benoni and Tsal 2013, 522). There have also been suggestions that procedural patterns in scanning the driving scene may produce automatized eye movements, which then replace the guidance of fixations. However, recent research has focused on the phenomenon of change blindness as the potential cause of looking but feeling to see. Change blindness is the phenomenon that is associated with the difficulty to notice changes if those changes take place when vision is temporarily disrupted. Such instances can be in the example of an eye movement or an eye blink. There are numerous real-life consequences of change blindness. This phenomenon of change blindness can be demonstrated using repeated presentations of two pictures which are almost similar except for a single change in one of them. The two pictures would then be presented with interleaved blank screens between them to mimic the effects of an eye movement or blink. The repeated sequence of picture one-blank picture two- blank is been made to try and establish whether the difference between the two pictures can be spotted. According to typical findings, it is difficult for people to differentiate between the two pictures even after prolonged repeated sequences. Recent research activities on change detection have shown some outstanding failures related to the detection of visual changes that occur between views of an object or scene (Murphy et al. 2016, 1317). Such documents suggest that there are few details contained in visual representations. Although most of these studies demonstrate the phenomenon of change blindness for still objects and those in motion, their capacity to assess the representation of an object in real world is limited. According to the perceptual load theory, when a task places high demand on attention, the processing of other stimuli not relevant to the task can be prevented. Specifically, when the amount of information that must be processed, that is, the perceptual load, in a task is considerably high, the attention capacity is exhausted on that task. As a result, early selection happens. This is in contrast to situations where low perceptual load is involved. In such situations, both relevant and irrelevant stimuli to a task are process to simultaneously. Late selection takes place in these situations to prevent distraction (Pugnaghi et al. 2020, 2642). As such, distractor interference can be reduced in situations of high perceptual load through the prevention of the processing of irrelevant stimuli. Although the limitations and flaws of visual processing are well known, the layperson can be ignorant to these weaknesses because of the complete and natural look of everyday perception. The common impression that vision is continuous, unlimited, and seamless can make people overestimate their ability to perceive their surroundings while performing different tasks. Regarding the topic of driving behavior, the failure to notice objects due to change blindness caused by perceptual load can have catastrophic consequences for the driver and other road users. Therefore, it is important to highlight the limitations associated with attention in order to encourage people to consider them while driving, hence leading to improvements in driving behavior. Support for the model has been derived from various demonstrations and paradigms. For example, the phenomena of motion induced blindness have been used during the training of pilots to demonstrate visual flows and to emphasize on the need for pilots to move their eyes and head around when scanning their environment. Other experiments have shown that people miss large proportions of objects, especially those characterized by complex displays or those that are rare (Raveh and Lavie 2015, 484). There are numerous factors that can influence the difficulty of observing a change in a change blindness task. If a change that introduces a semantic inconsistent to an image is made, then such a change becomes easy to detect. Notably, change blindness does not necessarily require visual occlusion, particularly because it can still occur when gradual changes are introduced in a scene. Furthermore, perceptual load can also modulate the performance of change detection. The facts regarding the effects of position of change and perceptual load on change blindness are important for driver safety (Remington et al. 2014, 229). Therefore, there is a possible relationship between change blindness and road safety. Going by the fact that change blindness can occur in laboratory conditions on single task experiments, and that other real-life task such as conversations can be subject to the change blindness effect, then change detection in complex tasks such as driving can be even more difficult. A driver is required to make continuous updates of their representation of numerous aspects of the world as they move at speed. Perceptual load does not only involved distraction but irrelevant stimuli, but also the subjective awareness of such stimuli by an individual. Specifically, high load brings about inattentional blindness, a situation that is characterized by the failure of people to notice stimuli that is otherwise easily visible. In line with the perceptual load model, under high perceptual load, early selective attention occurs when interference by incompatible distractors is eliminated. Since the incompatible distractor is not processed, then the response times are considerably faster. It is important to note that many of the studies conducted for the understanding of the effect of perceptual load on change blindness are artificial tasks that may not fully represent real world attention. The need to understand whether the effect is extended to real life in change blindness requires more applied research on the perceptual load model. The available research shows that change blindness can occur in most of everyday tasks. According to the Rensink flicker experiment, there is a significant difference between looking and seeing. A large fraction of accidents on the roads are characterized by the driver looking but not seeing. Drivers sometimes run into trains, other cars directly in front of them, or collide with pedestrians. Whereas the eyes of the drivers are receiving information from the world, this information is lost somewhere along the way, hence, causing a loss of connection with reality. The findings of this experiment can be demonstrated using a flicker paradigm which shows how change blindness is induced. The flicker paradigm was developed by Rensink, O’Regan, and Clark to determine whether the insensitivity to scene changes is a general property associated with visual perception. A common view in change blindness research and literature is that the detection of change, as represented in the flicker paradigm, is dependent on the amount of visual attention given to the changing scene. The definition of visual attention in this context covers the internal mechanism for which visual codes are selected for further processing while others are ignored. Therefore, the purpose of visual attention is to maintain a representation of an object across the blank interval in the flicker experiment, hence, enabling the detection of change. The information on the unattended scene undergoes rapid decay and it is overwritten buy the visual encoding of a subsequence scene (Konstantinou et al. 2014, 1985). Researchers have, in different studies, sought to demonstrate that the detection of changes is dependent on the allocation of visual attention to the region that is changing. The detection of changes in the areas that are perceived to be of central interest happens more quickly than in the areas of marginal interest. This difference in detection performance is due to the fact that the areas of central interest are preferentially selected by visual attention. According to Lavie's load theory of attention, the role of perceptual load can be used to solve the contradictory relationship between conscious awareness and attention (Lavie et al. 2014, 20130205). Whereas distractors can be part of awareness in conditions of low load, there is a restriction on the awareness to the content of focused attention when high perceptual load is involved. Discussion Considering the abundant nature of the visual world, it is no surprise that people cannot capture of the visual details of a scene or object. This fact emphasizes on the importance of focusing on the few important objects and ignoring the rest. Numerous researchers have argued that the details of only a few areas of central interest in a scene can be fully represented. The effect of position of change and perceptual load on change blindness can be observed beyond simple experimental tasks such as letter-search and color detection to complex real-world situations and behavior. According to some of the explored experiments, there is a significant change on awareness associated with changing the levels of perceptual load in the tasks. For drivers on the road, it is common to perform gap p...