Changes

When researching our topic, Change Blindness, we found document upon document on several documents concerning this topic. Out of the great many documents we found, we choose 7 (seven) documents to focus on. After reading each document, we decided upon 5 (five) documents. One (1) was dismissed due to many grammatical errors, and while the other was dismissed due to repetitivenessit being almost identical to another document which was found. With the remaining five (5) documents in hand, we settled upon what our test will would cover, which is "Can “Can users notice one thing while being occupied by another?". Below, the five (5) ” Here are our results and findings from these documents will be discussed.

Our main primary document is called 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 “although attention appears to be necessary for change detection, it many may not be sufficient" sufficient” (Daniel J. Simons, Page 5). This means that regardless of if you are paying attention, you may not notice a sudden change, "All “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 (Simons, 1996)" table” (Daniel J. Simons, Page 5). With this in mind, we started to form out test parameters.

Our second secondary document is called titled Change-blindness as a result of mudsplashes, collaborated on by J. Kevin O'Regan, Ronald A. Rensink, and James J. Clark. This documents document is actually an article from Nature, Volume 398, published March 4th, 1999, page 34. This article is interesting, as it provides a study to help "validate" “validate” change blindness. It also follows closely with our own personal test, but along with a different path (pictures VS FaceBookvs. Facebook). In the article, they displayed 48 pictures, for 3 seconds, with a 'mud splash' for exactly 80 milliseconds. Where as Whereas with our research we displayed "notifications" (“notifications”, either by Liking 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 are were Beyond the Grand Illusion, collaborated upon by Alva Noe Noë of the University of California, Luiz Pessoa of the University of Rio De 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 is 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. To begin, we sat down as a team and discussed what questions we would need to ask people to gather information about how they use Facebook and . We also needed to determine what areas of the main Facebook page 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 7 laptops and the third to setup and supervise the subject.

The procedure for our first experiment was simple, ; we printed off our questionnaire and asked a few people to complete the survey. We never collected any personal information about the people being surveyed and the people being surveyed were informed about this. Once the person was finished filling in the survey, they returned it to us.

The procedure for the second experiment was quite simple contrary to the setup. It consisted of a very basic premise. The test subject would be viewing the Facebook home page, homepage where a chat window was open to one of the researchers. The researcher would then periodically send simple elementary maths to the subject to which they would have to solve and respond (ex. 2x4). Periodically the second researcher would ‘Like’ or ‘Post’ something on the subject wall causing a popup to appear in the bottom left-hand corner of their screen. The subject would then have to verbally say ‘notification’ to show that they noticed the change.

For collecting data, for both tests we ran into difficulty due to the sample size. For our second test, we were setup near the entrance to the library and computing commons we were frequently turned down for volunteers to participate in either of our studies. That being said we managed to get a larger sample for our smaller test due to it’s its small temporal footprint. The longer test got mixed answers ranging from ignoring our offer to promising to come back. We also 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 in the halls of Seneca College), students thought we were representing Student Federation and would ask us about bus schedules or information regarding services offered at the college.

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 talking with. The second most popular means of communication was using the 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 affect effect when we tried to send other forms of communication and to see what the response times where like.

In our second test 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 we would change====One of the main things we would change when gathering our primary data is a substantial increase in our sample size. With a combined total of roughly 20 people, there is a lot of room for error. If we surveyed 100 or more people per survey, there would be a more accurate result.  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.

Based on the research we conducted it is hard to make any definite conclusions , but upon combining our research with what we have learned from other papers the evidence eludes to the fact that change blindness is not prevalent in with Facebook users of Facebook. Another conclusion, although accidental, brought about by our research is that conducting human interactions with computer testing is difficult to attempt in a public setting. The general setup for the test is daunting to most and takes up too much time for most to place into their schedules unless you have some relation to them.

# Simons Beck, Diane M.; Rees, Daniel JGeraint. Current Approaches to Change Blindness; Frith, Christopher D. Cambridge; Lavie, MANilli. Neural correlates of change detection and change blindness. New York, USANew York: Harvard UniversityNature Publishing Group, 20072001.# O’ReganLevin, JDaniel T. Kevin. Rensink; Momen, Nausheen; Drivdahl, Ronald ASarah B. Clark; Simons, James Daniel J. Change Blindness Blindness: The Metacognitive Error of Overestimating Change-blindness as a result of ‘mudsplashes’detection Ability. New York Florence, New YorkKY: Macmillan Magazines Psychology Press Ltd, 1999.2000# Noë, Alva. ; Pessoa, Luiz. ; Thompson, Evan. Beyond the Grand Illusion: What Change Blindness Really Teaches Us About Vision. Florence, KY: Psychology Press Ltd, 2000# BeckO’Regan, Diane MJ. Rees Kevin; Rensink, Geraint. FrithRonald A; Clark, Christopher DJames J. Lavie, Nilli. Neural correlates Change-blindness as a result of change detection and change blindness‘mudsplashes’. New York, New York: Nature Publishing GroupMacmillan Magazines Ltd, 20011999.# LevinSimons, Daniel TJ. Current Approaches to Change Blindness. Momen Cambridge, MA, Nausheen. DrivdahlUSA: Harvard University, Sarah B2007. Simons, Daniel J# Wikipedia. Change Blindness Blindness. Unknown, 2011. <http: The Metacognitive Error of Overestimating Change-detection Ability//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness>. Florence November 20, KY2011.  =Final Report=Download: [[File: Psychology Press Ltd, 2000BTHEssay.pdf | BTHEssay]]