Safety Video

Another video from the people who brought you the motorcycle safety video which used the psychological phenomenon of 'looming', and the 'time to arrival' illusion.

This one features 'change blindness'. Wikipedia tells us that . . .

In visual perception, change blindness is the phenomenon that occurs when a person viewing a visual scene apparently fails to detect large changes in the scene. For change blindness to occur, the change in the scene typically has to coincide with some visual disruption such as a saccade (eye movement) or a brief obscuration of the observed scene or image. When looking at still images, a viewer can experience change blindness if part of the image changes.

'Saccades' have been mentioned in a previous post here. Simply (ie 'in a a way I understand it'), your brain doesn't 'like' not having clear things to see, so if you're blinking, or your eyes are moving, or you have a brain injury which damages part of your visual field, then your brain will fill the gap.

Try another.

As much as we riding instructors bang on about 'improving observation', you simply can't see - and remember - everything. So the skill is in seeing the important stuff.

More:

When Good Observers Go Bad: Change Blindness, Inattentional Blindness, and Visual Experience
Rensink, Ronald A. (2000)

Download the pdf here



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