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Nornagest comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong
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Attentional blink?
No, that doesn't seem to be it. Although an online test seems to suggest that I don't suffer from this, so that's nice to know.
What I'm thinking of has several apparently static figures on a screen, and as you look around the picture, things change when you're not looking at them (even though you think that you're looking at them, because the entire screen is in your field of vision the entire time). I think that mostly they change colour and stuff, but sometimes they disappear entirely. You can't just do this online, since there also has to be something to track your focus of attention, so I've only read about it.
I believe this is just known as change blindness.
Edit: Hm, no, looks like you're describing something more specific. I still think it falls under change blindness, though...
Yes, this seems reasonable, although I don't recognise the term.
ETA: Following Wikipedia's links, the stuff here from 8:30 to 10:00 seems most like what I'm thinking of, although still not quite as dramatic as what I remember.
By this point, it's possible that my memory is just faulty.
I think I saw a demo, or video a demo, about 15 years ago, of the ERICA gaze-tracking program at UVA where onlookers could see the screen change characters while the person whose gaze was being tracked couldn't see the changes. If I remember correctly, it was a screen of normal text in MS-Word or something that would mutate into gibberish where the user wasn't watching.
OK, then somebody else remembers it! (I don't remember that it was text, but this is close enough.)
Oh, OK, I misunderstood what you were saying. That's not change blindness, then, that's just not being able to see things you're not looking at...
But which you think that you're looking at, so that at the end you're surprised by the change. The change-blindness stuff in Dennett's video that I cited 4 posts up had the same result, although a different method. (Whether that similarity is enough to make DaveX's stuff also count as "change blindness", I have no opinion.)
A fun thing happend to me. I did the test at http://mindbluff.com/movblink.htm and I noticed the C but only subconciously, that is I knew that I had seen the C, but I didn't remember actually seing it.
I consciously saw an R, and I consciously saw a C later in the sequence, but I couldn’t tell if they were actually consecutive, nor if there were other R’s and C’s around them. (I didn’t look at the video in slow motion to check.)
Just in case someone’s counting :)
The first time, I noticed the ‘C’ only. The second time, I consciously noticed them both. (ETA: This isn't the test that I took before.)
To what extent might your feeling that ‘I knew that I had seen the C’ be influenced by their having earlier told you that you would? (For that matter, what are the odds that what I ‘consciously noticed’ was an illusion?) An interesting test might be one where there is no ‘C’, asking people whether they saw it.
Without the test it's impossible to know. I find it quite plausible that some part of my brain noticed the attention blink because it was primed to it and "filled in" the C.