«Dead Zones» in Attention

This essay describes two experimental studies, which demonstrate the existence of «dead zones» in visual attention. The phenomenon of «dead zones» manifests in the task of finding and identifying changes, and is one example within the currently widely-studied field of change blindness – the inability to find and/ or identify visual changes of an object in a field of vision, under the conditions of interruptions of perception in the moment of the aforementioned changes. «Dead zones» in visual attention are starkly expressed «blindness» to changes in objects which are located in close proximity to an object which attracts higher attention. In Experiment 1, the phenomenon of «dead zones» is demonstrated in the context of a standard methodology of «flickering», designed to study change blindness in complex visual scenarios (Rensink et al., 1997). In Experiment 2, the phenomenon is demonstrated by a specially developed methodology of sudden changes. This essay discusses hypotheses of the possible mechanisms pertaining to these «dead zones» in attention.

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