Looking but not seeing

Abstract

Motivation: In this paper we report on part of a study to understand how information layering techniques can be used to reduce change blindness. Change blindness, in general, is the failure of the human to detect changes to information that occur within his or her visual field. There are several variants of failures of visual awareness known as: Change Blindness, Inattentional Blindness, Repetition Blindness, and Comparison Blindness. Failure or delays in observing changes in complex, dynamic and safety critical systems by, say, operators can lead to disastrous outcomes. Hence, drawing together the different reasons reported in the literature can provide us with a first step towards developing design techniques for reducing change blindness in the hope that we can contribute to better and safer systems.