title: Change detection and change blindness in pigeons (Columba livia).
abstract: Change blindness is a phenomenon in which even obvious details in a visual scene change without being noticed. Although change blindness has been studied extensively in humans, we do not yet know if it is a phenomenon that also occurs in other animals. Thus, investigation of change blindness in a nonhuman species may prove to be valuable by beginning to provide some insight into its ultimate causes. Pigeons learned a change detection task in which pecks to the location of a change in a sequence of stimulus displays were reinforced. They were worse at detecting changes if the stimulus displays were separated by a brief interstimulus interval, during which the display was blank, and this primary result matches the general pattern seen in previous studies of change blindness in humans. A second experiment attempted to identify specific stimulus characteristics that most reliably produced a failure to detect changes. Change detection was more difficult when interstimulus intervals were longer and when the change was iterated fewer times.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Whitman College.
authors.forename: Walter T
authors.initials: WT
authors.lastname: Herbranson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Whitman College.
authors.forename: Yvan T
authors.initials: YT
authors.lastname: Trinh
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Whitman College.
authors.forename: Patricia M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Xi
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Whitman College.
authors.forename: Mark P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Arand
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Whitman College.
authors.forename: Michael S K
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Barker
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Whitman College.
authors.forename: Theodore H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Pratt
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D010856:Columbidae / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*