"Change deafness" - the scant attention we pay to the voice on the end of the phone | Science News | Scoop.it

Our perception of the world is so restricted by the brain's finite attentional resources that large changes to the visual scene can occur without us noticing. Psychologists have studied this extensively and they call it "change blindness". But what about our limited vigilance to the world of sound? In a new study, Kimberly Fenn and her team have tested whether people notice when, mid phone-conversation, the person they're talking to changes. They found that unless there was a change of gender, most people didn't notice they were talking to someone else - a phenomenon the researchers call "change deafness".