In what scenario might change blindness occur?

Change blindness refers to the phenomenon where an individual fails to notice substantial changes in a visual scene, often due to focusing their attention elsewhere. In the scenario where a person is focused on a specific event, this concentrated attention can lead to a lack of awareness of other details or changes that occur in the surrounding environment.

When individuals direct their attention to a particular aspect of a situation, they may become less aware of changes that occur outside of that focus. For example, if a person is watching a basketball game, they might miss that a player has changed their jersey number because they are fixated on the action of the game itself. This illustrates how focused engagement can result in overlooking significant alterations in the visual field, exemplifying the essence of change blindness.

In contrast, the other scenarios either involve specific tasks that might require a different cognitive handling of visual information (like change detection tasks), or conditions that might influence attention in different ways but do not directly illustrate the core concept of change blindness as effectively as the scenario involving focused attention on a particular event.