To See or Not to See: The Need for Attention to Perceive Changes in Scenes

Change-blindness experiments showing that even large changes are hard to detect when separated by a blank interval.

Rensink et al. (1997)Journaldoi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00427.x

Citation

Rensink, R. A., O'Regan, J. K., & Clark, J. J. (1997). To See or Not to See: The Need for Attention to Perceive Changes in Scenes. Psychological Science, 8(5), 368–373.

Method

Visual perception experiment.

Claims used

Attention is required to perceive change.
Without a local motion cue, attention is guided by higher-level interests, making off-focus changes easy to miss.

Limitations: The stimuli were landscape photographs, not interfaces.

Extracted principles

Signal changes where they occurNot tested
Changes that users could overlook should be signaled where they happen; without a local cue, changes may go unnoticed.
Feedback at the point of actionSupported
An action should confirm its result at the triggering control, without shifting the layout, and announce the outcome to assistive technology.

MicrointeractionsMotion