Essay On Change Blindness
1 – Briefly describe the aim(s) of the study
The primary aim of the study, stated in the introduction, is to assess change blindness in real life with direct participants rather than through television, photographs and computer screens. The experiment tests the hypothesis that people are more likely to detect changes in a scene when directly participating in the experiment. Due to the results of the initial experiment, the aim of the study evolved to assess the effect of social groups on change blindness. They hypothesised that change blindness would increase if the participant viewed the experimenter as a part of an ‘out-group’.
2 – Indicate whether or not the study was theoretically motivated.
The introduction mentions many previous experiments on change blindness, focusing on two specific studies. The first of which indicated that changes in objects that were the centre of interest in images were detected much faster than changes in peripheral objects (Rensink et al., 1997) and the second which indicated the much more than attention is needed in order to detect changes (Levin & Simons, 1997). …show more content…
Although they had participants from varying ages (20 to 65 years old), there were only 15 participants in the first experiment which may be too small of a sample if they are trying to generalise the results to the whole world or even just to the United States of America where the experiment toke place. Furthermore, the research does not state whether there were equal amounts of males and females which could possibly make the results unreliable if one gender is more susceptible to change blindness. Finally, as the experiment was conducted on a university campus, all the student may be of a similar socio-economic group as university can be quite expensive. This may result in little to no participants from a lower social-economic group and is therefore not representative of the
The primary aim of the study, stated in the introduction, is to assess change blindness in real life with direct participants rather than through television, photographs and computer screens. The experiment tests the hypothesis that people are more likely to detect changes in a scene when directly participating in the experiment. Due to the results of the initial experiment, the aim of the study evolved to assess the effect of social groups on change blindness. They hypothesised that change blindness would increase if the participant viewed the experimenter as a part of an ‘out-group’.
2 – Indicate whether or not the study was theoretically motivated.
The introduction mentions many previous experiments on change blindness, focusing on two specific studies. The first of which indicated that changes in objects that were the centre of interest in images were detected much faster than changes in peripheral objects (Rensink et al., 1997) and the second which indicated the much more than attention is needed in order to detect changes (Levin & Simons, 1997). …show more content…
Although they had participants from varying ages (20 to 65 years old), there were only 15 participants in the first experiment which may be too small of a sample if they are trying to generalise the results to the whole world or even just to the United States of America where the experiment toke place. Furthermore, the research does not state whether there were equal amounts of males and females which could possibly make the results unreliable if one gender is more susceptible to change blindness. Finally, as the experiment was conducted on a university campus, all the student may be of a similar socio-economic group as university can be quite expensive. This may result in little to no participants from a lower social-economic group and is therefore not representative of the