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The Science Behind the Sixth Sense
Ever walk into a room and have a feeling that something has changed, but you can't quite put your finger on what's different?
You’re not crazy and you’re not psychic, but you are adept at detecting visual changes. Known as “mindsight,” this phenomenon is being scientifically mapped out by University of British Columbia (UBC) researcher Dr. Ronald Rensink. “A lot of people can relate to it,” he explains. “What’s new is that we now have a scientific handle on things.”
 Dr. Rensink developed a flicker paradigm, a method to investigate how people detect change without attention. Participants saw a display in which an original and altered image continually alternated, with a blank screen briefly appearing between them. Under these conditions, a third of the participants felt a change before they could identify it.
“It's very difficult to see change without attention,” explains the vision scientist. To perceive change, you need attention. Without attention, people miss things and don’t see what’s right in front of them. Magicians use our inability to detect change by controlling our attention while making changes, like magically pulling a bunny out of a hat. The need for attention to see what’s right in front of you becomes critical when you’re driving and talking on your cellphone, trying to read a visually cluttered Web site, or working long hours viewing airport baggage X-rays. “We need to reduce the load on our conscious minds,” explains Dr. Rensink, an NSERC researcher. “Non-conscious abilities like sensing may be one way of doing this.”
In collaboration with the Human-Computer Interaction Group at UBC, Dr. Rensink will look into change detection differences in different individuals. He will look at the importance of perceptual abilities and personality differences in change detection. If he discovers individual differences, he will try to map them and see if people can be trained to detect change more rapidly. “We’re just beginning,” he says. “It’s a great time to be a vision scientist.”
Contact:
Dr. Ronald Rensink
Tel.: (604) 822-2579
E-mails: rensink@psych.ubc.ca; rensink@cs.ubc.ca
Web sites: http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/; http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rensink/
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