OVERFLOW

What position is characterized by the top diagram? The bottom?

Top — conceptual blindness

Bottom — perceptual blindness

What is perceptual blindness?

Inattentional blindness

• Claims that a subject does not consciously see a detail that has been changing between two very similar images

• Attentional bottleneck (direct attention) is necessary for conscious seeing since the conscious perception is sparse, whereas the unconscious perception is rich

What is conceptual blindness?

Inattentional lack of cognitive access to the difference

• Claims that you consciously see things but only conceptualize the parts that you attend to

• Directional attention filters between our conscious perception and cognition, making conscious perception rich and cognition sparse

Why do both conceptual and perceptual say perception is rich?

Both state perception is rich, but one refers to conscious perception while the other refers to unconscious perception

Sperling’s experiment

• Subjects briefly shown a 3×4 matric

• After the board was removed, subjects heard an auditory cue indicating which row to report

• Findings revealed people could reliably report 3-4 letters in a row indicated by the cue, meaning that they perceived all 12 letters or otherwise they would not be able to report letters in a specific row with such accuracy

• So, perception is rich no matter if it is conscious or unconscious

Describe one item of evidence for each position

Change blindness can be used as evidence for perceptual blindness

• Subjects shown a series of a picture followed by a blank followed by the previously shown picture with some change, and then the series repeats

• Subjects usually unable to point to the difference between pictures despite the changes being somewhat significant

• Support perceptual blindness because subjects could be said to not have consciously seen the change, might have unconsciously but since people cannot report seeing something change, they did not consciously see it

  • Assumes reporting something = conscious of it

Sperling’s experiment can be used as evidence for conceptual blindness

• Subjects briefly shown a 3×4 matric

• After the board was removed, subjects heard an auditory cue indicating which row to report

• Findings revealed people could reliably report 3-4 letters in a row indicated by the cue, meaning that they perceived all 12 letters or otherwise they would not be able to report letters in a specific row with such accuracy

• Because any row of 3 letters taken from the 12 could be picked out and recalled, there must have been a rich conscious perception of all the letters

  • Assumes if people can’t report, they saw it but did not conceptualize it