Written by: Jed Abarro, Coleen Defensor, Livvy Perez, Elysia Santos, and Mara Taguinod
Have you ever realized later on that you didn’t notice something change even though it happened right in front of you? Like your friend changing their shirt and you only realizing when they pointed it out, even if you were together all day? This phenomenon is called “change blindness”, and from the name it means you are blind a change that happens right in front of you (Goldstein, 2010).
To get an idea of how important attention is to detecting something like change, watch this interesting video about the art of misdirection. (It’s cool, pls. watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZGY0wPAnus) What happens in this video is the phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”, and since it’s not entirely different from change blindness, it’ll give you an idea about the topic (change blindness also happens sometime in the video, you’ll see!).
(^They use the concept of misdirection in this anime.)
But, aside from the phenomenon of change blindness, there is also the phenomenon called “change deafness”, which, well, is basically the same as change blindness, but instead of not being able to see the change, you don’t hear the change. For example, you may have experienced listening to music while you’re doing something, but even though the music playing on your playlist had already changed, you don’t notice it until later on because you were so busy doing something else (you know, like writing a paper or preparing for a report). There have been some studies on change deafness, such as Vitevitch’s (2003) study, where participants engaged in a shadowing task, and 40% of them weren’t able to detect the change.
Being the curious psychology students we are, we decided to do an experiment on this interesting phenomenon of change deafness. But we didn’t just test change blindness on it’s own--we added two more different variables to see if they had an effect on our ability to detect change deafness. These two variables were task difficulty and pleasurable background music. We hypothesized that an easy level of task difficulty and the group with music would do best at detecting change.
So, how did we manipulate task difficulty? If you’re still familiar with the game Simon Says, congratulations! You’re officially old! (Because seriously, some of the participants didn’t know what Simon Says was). Okay, kidding aside, our change deafness experiment involved the game Simon Says. For the kids reading this, Simon Says is a game where if an instruction is preceded with “Simon says…” you do the instruction, but if the instruction has no “Simon says” before it you don’t do it.
“Simon says jump”  -- You should jump
“Sit down” -- You don’t do it
For the easy tasks, we only asked them to do one instruction (Simon says sit). For the difficult tasks, we asked them to do three different instructions (Simon says, jump two times, do a full turn, and clap your hands).
As for pleasurable background music, we asked the participants what their “feel-good” music was for the day, and we would play it if they were assigned to the with music group. The reason why we added pleasurable background music as a factor was because we thought it would help them detect the change.
Our experiment simply went like this:
80 participants were asked to play Simon Says. The instructions were the key points to this experiment--it was where the change was happening. Basically, two different males voiced the instruction: one did the first half, and the other did the second. There were two variations to this: the easy and the difficult task, which we explained earlier. And then as for the music, there were two groups: with music, and without music.
Interestingly!! There were people that did say that they didn’t realize the voice change, even though they were there listening to the instructions the entire experiment. Sadly though, even though the number of people who detected the change were more than those who did not detect it, statistically speaking, our results weren’t significant D: (which means it can’t be said with certainty that this phenomenon can be generalized).
However, analysis of the results showed that those who did the easy task was able to detect the change more than those who did the difficult task. Makes sense, don’t you think? Because, really, your brain probably can’t process too much information. This is what we’d call cognitive load which Sweller (1988) defines as the amount of mental effort taking place in our working memory. Causse and colleagues (2016) did a study on the impact of cognitive load on inattentional blindness, and they confirmed that an increased cognitive load decreased the ability to detect differences.
Also, those in the with music group were able to detect the change more than those who were in the without music group. Just like what we thought, music did help in detecting the changes! Know why? You guys may have heard about the Mozart Effect, a phenomenon that occurs when being in a positive frame of mind improves one’s intellectual performance (Wolfe, 2015). This may be one reason why music can help when we’re doing some tasks.But since our results weren’t considered significant, we have to consider why music didn’t help. The reason for this might be because instead of helping, the music may have just distracted the participants. Huang & Shih (2011) found in their study that the more the participants like the music, the worse their performance was, so it may not always be the case that your preferred music will help you :(
Since we are not pros at researching yet, our research may have had some setbacks that made the results insignificant. One, the number of participants may have been too small. The more, the better, but we weren’t able to find more participants due to limited time. Second, the music may have not induced a pleasant mood to the participants. There may be other ways to induce pleasant mood, and it might also be a good idea to test not just pleasant mood, but also unpleasant mood (e.g. sad). Third, maybe we should’ve used natural voices instead of computer generated ones.
To the researchers who want to know more, and to the curious ones who have any questions, please feel free to contact us through this blog!
That’s our team, tuning out! ;D
Causse, M., Imbert, J. P., Giraudet, L., Jouffrais, C., & Tremblay, S. (2016). The role of cognitive and perceptual loads in inattentional deafness. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 10. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00344
Goldstein, E. (2010). Sensation and Perception (8th ed.). Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.
Huang, R.H., & Shih, Y.N. (2011). Effects of background music on concentration of workers. IOS Press,Work 38 (2011) 383–387 383. doi 10.3233/WOR-2011-1141
Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12 (2),257-285. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4
Vitevitch, M. S. (2003). Change deafness: The inability to detect changes between two voices. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29(2), 333-342. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.29.2.333
Wolfe, J.M., et al. (2015). Sensation and Perception (4th edition). USA: Sinauer Associates.
