Change blindness

Biological Parallel

Gradual changes circumvent motion detection systems: alterations below threshold duration evade conscious attention. Pigeons exhibit change blindness influenced by salience and timing—missing scene alterations in flicker paradigms just as humans do. Chimpanzees fail to detect changes in visual search tasks after blank displays. The phenomenon extends beyond perception to environmental baselines: a 2024 global synthesis of 73 case studies found widespread shifting baseline syndrome, where gradual habitat degradation becomes normalized across generations—creating ecological amnesia. Each degradation step gets accepted as 'new normal' before the next occurs. When change happens below the threshold for motion detectors and attention-based comparison, detection systems optimized for discrete events fail. Slow degradation evades the alarm.