Exhibit 02 · Wing of Perception
A whole detail vanishes from the scene in front of you. You will swear nothing moved.
well-replicated since 1997 · both scenes drawn for this museum — no borrowed stimuli
Round 1 of 2 — the scene flickers. One thing keeps changing.
FLICKERS: 0
Watch as long as you like. When you think you know what changes, stop and point at it.
Your visual field feels like a rich, continuous photograph. It isn't. At any instant, detail exists only where attention is parked; everything else is a confident summary. When a change is hidden inside a flicker (which wipes out the motion signal that would normally shout "over here!"), you must search the scene item by item — and people routinely stare for dozens of alternations, certain nothing is happening, while a whole object blinks in and out of existence.
Rensink, O'Regan and Clark demonstrated the flicker paradigm in 1997; Simons and Levin carried it into the street in 1998, where roughly half of pedestrians failed to notice that the stranger asking them for directions had been swapped for a different person when two workers carried a door between them. The lesson isn't that your eyes are bad — it's that "seeing" was never the camera work you assumed it was.