Proceedings of the 69th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, 69:89. 1998. [EPA 1998; Boston, MA.]

When brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking form of "change blindness" is induced, where the changes are difficult to see (Rensink, O'Regan, and Clark, 1997). Experiments are presented here examining the dependence of this phenomenon on initial preview and type of transient caused by the blanks. Results support the idea that our representation of the world is a sparse one, coordinated by attentional mechanisms.