the driver’s interlocutor a similar amount of infor-
mation as a passenger typically has, reduced the
number of collisions with merging vehicles to the
same as the number that occurred when talking to
a passenger in the adjacent seat (Gaspar et al., 2014).
The researchers speculated that this is because the
conversation partner cannot only warn the driver
about unexpected events, but can also modulate
their conversation depending on changing traffic,
allowing the driver to devote more attention to driv-
ing and so reducing inattentional blindness.
It is also strikingly easy to induce ‘blindness’ during
much simpler tasks, like walking. When people use
mobiles while walking, they walk more slowly, change
direction more frequently, are less likely to acknowl-
edge other people, and are less likely to notice a unicy-
cling clown ride past them (Hyman et al., 2010). So even
with an activity as relatively undemanding as walking,
we are highly susceptible to competing demands on
our attention, to the point of effective ‘blindness’. The
blindness can sometimes be useful, though, not only for preventing overload but
also for allowing ‘banner blindness’ to unwanted advertising. Being selective is, after
all, the blessing as well as the curse.IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORIES
OF VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS
What do these results on change blindness and inattentional blindness mean
for consciousness? They seem to challenge the simplistic ‘stream of vision’ theory,
and to imply that vision is not a process of building up detailed inner representa-
tions that can be used to compare the scene from one moment to the next. They
suggest that we do not hold on to nearly as much information as we seem to need,
and ‘the richness of our visual world is, to this extent, an illusion’ (Blackmore et al.,
1995, p. 1075). Yet obviously something is retained, otherwise we would have no
sense of continuity and not even notice if the entire scene changed. So we should
be cautious about leaping to exaggerated conclusions (Simons and Rensink, 2005).
The results do not prove that we never have a detailed representation of the
scene, or that during a saccade we retain no representation of what was seen
just before. We might fail to detect a change even with representations of both
the pre-change and post-change scenes if a very short-lived initial representation
were overwritten by the next scene. We might have detailed representations of
both versions of the scene available at once but fail to compare them properly. Or
we might accurately represent details of the original scene but then not update
them when the scene changes, believing we have already extracted all the mean-
ing we need. We may even cleverly combine both representations, retaining some
features from each and so never notice that there ever were two versions. There
are therefore many possible interpretations, and theorists vary in how much, and(Beth and ekroll, 2015). other studies have investi-
gated the importance of hand movement and object
handling in false transfers (otero-millan et al., 2011;
Phillips, natter, and egan, 2015), and the different
responses of the brain to magic tricks as opposed to
other surprising events (Parris et al., 2009).
the scientific study of magic, and the magical study of
cognition, are expanding rapidly, and in some respects
just catching up with what magicians have known for
centuries. Researchers describe the development of ‘a
neurobiology of disbelief’ (Parris et al., 2009) or ‘a sci-
ence centered around the experience of wonder’ (Rensink
and Kuhn, 2015) to tell us more about cognition, meta-
cognition, and why our illusions sometimes give us such
pleasure.