Hidden In Plain Sight: The Attentional Mechanisms of Change Blindness

Abstract

Research on change blindness has shown that attention plays a significant role in detecting changes in one’s environment. Given this finding, the goal of this thesis is to design an experiment that not only tries to determine if attention-capturing facial stimuli distracts participants from detecting changes in a flicker paradigm, but also determines if participants’ variation in facial recognition capabilities can mediate this effect. The results of this experiment found that participants were distracted by changes when faces were present, but the magnitude of this effect was not correlated with facial recognition capabilities. In conclusion, this thesis indicates that the attention-capturing quality of faces account for the general exacerbation of the change blindness phenomenon.