The voice on the end of the phone line
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, Assistant Professor Kimberly Fenn from the University of Chicago, 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".
Read more on our Research Digest.
