Chapter 3 Visual attention and visual awareness

Abstract

Intuitively, vision appears to be an easy process—effortless, almost automatic, and so efficient that a simple glance at a complex scene is sufficient to produce immediate awareness of its entire structure and elements. However, observers fail to notice the appearance or disappearance of a large object, the change in identity of the person they are conversing with, or the passage of a gorilla in the middle of a ball game. As a group, these visual failures are referred to as “change blindness.” Such limitations are rarely directly experienced in real life, except as one of the main instruments of magic tricks, yet they shape much of the visual perception. These peculiar phenomena reflect the limited capacity of an ingredient essential to much of visual perception, namely attention. While the retina potentially embraces the entire scene, attention can only focus on one or a few elements at a time, and thus, facilitate their perception, their recognition, or their memorization for later recall. This is not to say that perception cannot exist outside the focus of attention, as it is shown in this chapter.