Changes

This research essay will primarily focus paper focuses on the effects of change blindness through examining one of the largest used and most heavily, on the fly, modified webpages out there, Facebook. [add more here at some later point]

 When we first were introduced to change blindness in our BTH740 - Human Factors in Computing course at Seneca College and looked at change blindness videos online, we just found it to be fascinating phenomenon. As someone watching these videos or hearing stories, we couldn’t believe that people could have something major change in front of them, but because they were so focused on something else, typically something even smaller, they didn’t notice the big picture changing. With this in mind, we started thinking about how software systems are very dynamic and may contain several sections of a page automatically updating and being modified at once. We started wondering if change blindness would have any affect effect on the software that we will be writing in the future. When we were thinking of the future, we started thinking about the present and whether we might even be unaware of change blindness in software or other systems that we used currently. That is when we started wondering if even while we are using Facebook if there might be things that occur on the screen that we are completely unaware occuredoccurred.

The purpose of this essay was research paper is to explore whether or not the effects of change blindness affect users of Facebook as part of our final research essay paper for Seneca College’s fourth year Bachelors of Software development Development - Human Interactions with Computers course.

In order When researching our topic, Change Blindness, we found several documents concerning this topic. Out of the many documents we found, we choose seven documents to focus on. After reading each document, we decided upon five documents. One was dismissed due to many grammatical errors while the other was dismissed due to it being almost identical to create another document which was found. With the remaining five documents, we settled upon what our test would cover, which is “Can users notice one thing while being occupied by another?” Here are our tests results and findings from these documents.  Our primary document is titled Current Approaches to Change Blindness, and was written by Daniel J. Simons of Harvard University. This document is a great overview to the topic of change blindness. This document also provides challenges to studying change blindness. For instance, for someone to notice that a change has occurred, they must be paying attention. But in the document, Mr. Simons states that “although attention appears to be necessary for change detection, it may not be sufficient” (Daniel J. Simons, Page 5). This means that regardless if you are paying attention, you may not notice a sudden change, “All observers failed to notice when the central object in a brief motion picture (a soda bottle) was replaced by a box following a brief pan away from the table” (Daniel J. Simons, Page 5). With this in mind, we needed started to look into form out test parameters.  Our secondary document is titled Change-blindness as a result of mudsplashes, collaborated by J. Kevin O'Regan, Ronald A. Rensink, and James J. Clark. This document is actually an article from Nature, Volume 398, published March 4th, 1999. This article is interesting, as it provides a study to help “validate” change blindness. It also follows closely with our own personal test, but along with a different path (pictures vs. Facebook). In the article, they displayed 48 pictures, for 3 seconds, with a 'mud splash' for exactly 80 milliseconds. Whereas with our research which has already been conducted we displayed “notifications”, either by liking a post, or posting something on the tester wall. This was done in intervals, ranging from every second up to 10 seconds. After seeing the similarities between this and our initial idea for a test, our test appeared to be finalized.  Our three remaining documents were Beyond the Grand Illusion, collaborated upon by Alva Noë of the field University of California, Luiz Pessoa of the University of Rio de Janeiro, and Evan Thompson of York University. This document shows a more physical look at change blindness, including how human biology can be a factor. The second document is Neural correlates of change detection and change blindness, collaborated upon by Diane M. Beck, Geraint Rees, Christopher D. Frith and Nilli Lavie. This document talks about how research was done with MRI's to see how the brain reacts when experiencing change blindness. The final document studied was Change Blindness Blindness: The metacognitive Error of Overestimating Change-detection Ability, collaborated upon by Daniel T. Levin, Nausheen Momen, Sarah B. Drivdahl as well as Daniel J. Simons. This final article helped with our primary research the most, but does not pertain to our subject as much since it did not deal with our thesis. It was more of presenting findings from someone else's research.

As part of our primary research , we decided to conduct two experiments. The first was a surface quiz of sorts where we simply polled people on their Facebook experiences to see if we were heading in the right direction. The second was a longer form of analysis where we had them use Facebook and we would record the results.

To begin our research, we surveyed Facebook users about their Facebook use habits. Our demographic for our tests were young adults between the ages 17-25 who were attending a post-secondary institution. We began by asking them To begin, we sat down as a team and discussed what questions we would need to ask people to gather information about how they used use Facebook . We also needed to communicate with others. They were given the option determine what areas of private messaging (i.e. the main Facebook message feature), instant messaging (i.e. Facebook chat) or using wall postspage we would want to focus our attention when we would test them in our second wave of testing.

Our second wave of research consisted of a booth setup outside of Seneca@York’s library and computing commons. Our demographic for our tests were young adults between the ages 17-25 who were attending a post-secondary institution. We had a table setup with three laptops, two running windows Windows 7 for the testers and one running Fedora 15 for the subject. The subjects’ subject’s computer was also outfitted with had gtk-recordMyDesktop, installed. This allowed us afterwards to view the users user’s actions on the webpage in conjunction with a FujiFilm Finepix camera mounted above the screen to record their eye movements. We utilized three supervising researchers throughout the process, the first two operating the windows Windows 7 laptops and the third to setup and supervise the subject.

The procedure ==== Data collection ====For collecting data, for both tests we ran into difficulty due to the sample size. For our second experiment was quite simple contrary test, we were setup near the entrance to the setuplibrary and computing commons we were frequently turned down for volunteers to participate in either of our studies. It consisted of That being said we managed to get a very basic premise. The larger sample for our smaller test subject would be viewing the Facebook home page, a chat window was open due to one of the researchersits small temporal footprint. The researcher would then periodically send simple maths longer test got mixed answers ranging from ignoring our offer to the subject to which they would have promising to solve and respond (excome back. 2x4). Periodically We also had the second researcher would ‘Like’ or ‘Post’ something on the subject wall causing difficulty that since we had a popup Student Federation banner (this because we needed permission, which we obtained from Student Federation, to appear perform our survey in the bottom left-hand corner halls of their screen. The subject Seneca College), students thought we were representing Student Federation and would then have to verbally say ‘notification’ to show that they noticed ask us about bus schedules or information regarding services offered at the changecollege.

For our first test the process of collecting data, for both tests we ran into difficulty due to the sample size. Since we were setup near was done by asking a few students in the entrance Open Lab to the library and computing commons we were frequently turned down for volunteers to participate fill in either of our studiessurvey. That being said As stated before, we managed to get a larger sample for our smaller test due to it’s small temporal footprint. The longer test got mixed answers ranging from ignoring our offer to promising to come back. We also simply just had the difficulty that since we had a Student Federation banner (this because we needed permission, which we obtained from Student Federation, to perform our survey people answer the questions in the halls survey. Most of Seneca College), students thought we the questions were representing Student Federation of the genre of circle which ones apply to you or circle one and would ask us about bus schedules or information regarding services offered at the collegeexplain why/why not.

For our second test the data extraction process was a bit more complex. We had three pieces of data that we had to look at: The eye movement in the film of the participant, so we could not when their eyes moved to the notification; the screen recording which shows us when the notifications appeared to the subject; and the audio also from the film which recorded when the user noticed the change. We then took the eye movements and compared them to the desktop recording to piece together whether or not they were blind to the notifications. The audio was later referenced to determine if their eye movements lied in a fashion and although they saw the change they did not actively process it.

Our In our first test, our results showed that for most people the most popular method of communication with others was using the Facebook chat feature. This was because this gave people instant communication with the person they were varied depending on talking with. The second most popular means of communication was using the tests Facebook messaging feature and finally the least most popular means of communication is communication through wall posts. Knowing how most people communicated with others allowed us to know how to flood users with information to see if change blindness would come into effect when we completed tried to send other forms of communication and admittedly, although our research only represents a small sample size, it seems to have some consistency of resultssee what the response times where like.

In our first second test [Insert stats here]we experienced a relatively small array of results. They ranged from participants immediately recognizing the change to users who had only a minor delay, i.e. two or three seconds. The average participant seemed to recognize the notifications almost as soon as they appeared. The most challenging aspect to analyzing the results was the fact that we lacked the tools to properly account for small changes in reaction times. This is important because in such a small amount of data, small variance could prove to provide tangible results if the scope of the participant selection were larger.

==== Things Another thing we would change====is the hardware we used for the second survey, the interactive booth session. We used a combination of hardware, ranging from an external camera to an open-sourced screen capturing program. If we could have used a laptop or desktop with a built in camera, and a screen capturing program that allowed the software to automatically tie in the camera feed, the data gathering step would be much quicker. Since there is a delay between what the camera shows and what the screen capture shows (both where running at a different frame rate), there was room for error. Only with this better hardware and software, would this error be eliminated once and for all.