Change blindness is the term used to describe the phenomenon in which observers are often unable to detect major changes made to a visual scene while their attention is momentarily diverted elsewhere. This article reports on a study of change blindness in the context of tasks performed by naval command and control system personnel. These operators are often heavily loaded with concurrent visual search, situation assessment, voice communications, and control-display manipulation tasks at large, physically-dispersed tactical situation displays. The study used a display containing 8 objects of interest. Considerable change blindness was demonstrated in that participants required 2 or more selections to correctly identify a changed object on nearly one-third of the test trials. Operator performance on 15% of the trials was equivalent to randomly guessing after making 3 incorrect selections. The authors discuss their results in terms of the organization of information and the use of different types of memory. The authors note that this research may prove useful in the design of computer workstations for military, the nuclear power industry, hospital emergency rooms, and air traffic control.
Samenvatting