Introduction to this Special Section on Change Blindness

Control panel operators charged with monitoring safety-critical displays can be in serious trouble if they don’t happen to be looking when something changes, because there is a good chance they will not detect the change. Even Web page browsers can become confused if two sequentially viewed pages are laid out similarly but have different content. It is a fact that observers have great difficulty detecting when information in a display has changed, especially when direct comparison between the images is not possible. These phenomena have been widely studied in the psychological literature because of their implications for theories of information processing and attention and are referred to as Change Blindness (CB) or a closely allied concept, Inattentional Blindness (IB). It is appropriate to call them phenomena because the failures can occur under the seemingly most obviously altered conditions. For example, when, in a video clip, one person is substituted for another during a cut from one image to another. It is not often that behavioral research topics have such a direct link to application as this one. In this issue we present two excellent articles that summarize the research literature on CB and IB and then present a wide range of applied examples and their implications, alerting human–computer interaction and display designers to the kinds of potential failures they should be concerned about and what to do about them. HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2004, Volume 19, pp. 387–388 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.