Example: seeing a bird that is singing in a tree or miss a road sign in plain sight Cell phone use while driving reduces attention and memory for billboards despite that fact that people still fixated on the signs (Strayer, Drews, and Johnston, 2003). Luck and Vogel (1997) used a sequential comparison change detection task. They found that performance dropped with set sizes larger than four. Verbal loads and cues did not impact performance. Change detection is only good for the saccade target (Bridgeman, Hendry, and Stark, 1975; Grimes, 1996; McConkie and Zola, 1979) Hollingworth, Richard, and Luck (2008) found gaze corrections occur unconsciously and require VSTM. Target circle expanded in size to inform participants they should focus attention on that item. The flicker paradigm eliminates both of these. If they are to the cause then the detection should be easy in the flicker paradigm. If attention is to blame, then the flicker caused by blank fields would interfere with the local motion signals preventing attention from being drawn to that area. People would fail to see large changes even with plenty of viewing time and when changes arent synchronized to saccades. They argue that attention is the key factor in both types of change blindness. Gray screen with a white rectangle in the center. A word appeared in the rectangle in the cue condition (3000 ms) (word cues were only used in experiment 3) 1000 ms gray field Flicker sequence for 60 sec or until a response was made Pictures were displayed for 240 ms Gray screen was displayed for 80 sec A = original image A` = modified image Image order was A, A, A`, A`, Ten participants were used in each experiment Five additional participants were used to determine what was central interest (CI) and marginal interest (MI) Experiments used 48 color images of real world scenes 27 deg. W x 18 deg. H One change (color, location, or presence v. absence) was made to an object or area Changes were also divided by degree of interest (CI v. MI) CI had 3+/5 people mention, MI had 0/5 people mention. Changes in intensity and color were similar for CI and MI The area of change in MI was on average 22 sq. deg. larger than in CI Participants had to push a key when a change is observed, then give a verbal description of the change. Participants were told of the types of changes and had six practice trials (two ex. of each type). Images occurred in random order. DV was the average number of alterations (proportional to RT) before the change was detected. Only responses that included the correct type of change and the object or area being changed were counted as correct. Low error rate of 1.2% in all the experiments. MI: change detection took an average of 17.1 alterations (10.9 s). Some images required over 80 alterations (50 s) for a change that appeared obvious once noticed. CI: much faster with an average of 7.3 alterations (4.7 s). MI took significantly longer than CI (p