Change detection and change blindness in pigeons (Columba livia)

• Published in: Journal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) Vol. 128; no. 2; p. 181
• Main Authors: Herbranson, Walter T, Trinh, Yvan T, Xi, Patricia M, Arand, Mark P, Barker, Michael S K, Pratt, Theodore H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.05.2014
• Subjects: Animals; Attention - physiology; Behavior, Animal - physiology; Columbidae - physiology; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Visual Perception - physiology
• ISSN: 1939-2087
• DOI: 10.1037/a0034567

Change blindness is a phenomenon in which even obvious details in a visual scene change without being noticed. Although change blindness has been studied extensively in humans, we do not yet know if it is a phenomenon that also occurs in other animals. Thus, investigation of change blindness in a nonhuman species may prove to be valuable by beginning to provide some insight into its ultimate causes. Pigeons learned a change detection task in which pecks to the location of a change in a sequence of stimulus displays were reinforced. They were worse at detecting changes if the stimulus displays were separated by a brief interstimulus interval, during which the display was blank, and this primary result matches the general pattern seen in previous studies of change blindness in humans. A second experiment attempted to identify specific stimulus characteristics that most reliably produced a failure to detect changes. Change detection was more difficult when interstimulus intervals were longer and when the change was iterated fewer times.