Failure to Perceive Change: From Neurons to Social Networks

Humans are fundamentally bad at perceiving change which is not expected to be present based on prior experience of the organism. Change blindness and inattentional blindness are striking such examples of failure to notice changes in a visual scene. This has been observed in other sensory systems including auditory and somatosensory. In conditions of crisis, whether it is a global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic or a local crisis such as Hurricane Katrina, profound changes in structure and function of previously static environmental elements occur and trickle down to each neighborhood, street corner, and individual person’s life. In such conditions of flux and instability, susceptibility to micro-perceptual failures such as change and inattentional blindness may be heightened. These phenomena occur at millisecond to seconds time scale, at the level of initial sensations and first level perceptions, however are linked to multimodal associative brain-wide processes. Here we review the evidence for, and develop a line of argument that following propositions hold true in conditions of crisis: (1) Frequency of change blindness events and related failures of micro-perceptions may be higher; (2) accumulation of micro-perceptual failures of a single sensory system such as vision can impact complex cognitive processes such as reasoning, reality-based belief, and judgment occurring over longer time scales and brain-wide networks; and (3) same failures of micro-perceptions across individuals in a population may have impact on faulty consensus assessments of reality of situation and missed opportunities for solution building on group or collective level.