Beyond the Grand Illusion: What Change Blindness Really Teaches Us About Vision

Experiments on scene perception and change blindness suggest that the visual system does not construct detailed internal models of a scene. These experiments therefore call into doubt the traditional view that vision is a process in which detailed representations of the environment must be constructed. The non-existence of such detailed representations, however, does not entail that we do not perceive the detailed environment. The “grand illusion hypothesis ” that our visual world is an illusion rests on (1) a problematic “reconstructionist” conception of vision, and (2) a misconception about the character of perceptual experience.