Abstract
In general, people tend to think that they will notice large changes made to visual scenes (Levin et al., 2000) and this collective overconfidence is part of what makes the phenomenon of change blindness so surprising. Yet, despite their overconfidence, are individuals in fact aware of and able to assess the relative difficulty of changes? We investigated whether participants’ judgments of their ability to detect changes predicted their own change blindness duration. First, participants (N = 219) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk completed a standard change blindness task consisting of 30 scenes that cycled between an unmodified and modified version of the image. Participants pressed a button when they noticed the change, providing a measure of change blindness. After 6 to 7 months had passed, we re-contacted the same participants and showed them the same 30 scenes, now with the unmodified and modified versions presented side-by-side and a bounding box highlighting the change. Participants rated how likely they would be to spot the change using a 5-point Likert scale. We found that participants’ ratings of change detection significantly predicted their change blindness duration for each image, such that changes rated as likely to be spotted were detected faster than changes rated as unlikely to be spotted (p < .001). These ratings continued to be predictive when accounting for the eccentricity and size of the change (p < .001). However, there was no advantage to using participants’ own ratings of change detection ability compared to the ratings from an independent group to predict change blindness duration, suggesting that differences among images (rather among individuals) contribute the most to change blindness. Together, these findings indicate that instead of having indiscriminate overconfidence, people are aware of the relative difficulty of changes and their meta-cognitive judgements of change detection ability accurately predict change blindness.