Change blindness, the inability to detect substantial visual changes when they occur during a disruption, serves as a useful tool for exploring the quality and quantity of our internal visual representations. Detecting a change requires a representation of prechange information and a comparison to post-change information, so failing to detect a change can potentially reveal limitations in forming, maintaining, and comparing representations. However, it has recently been suggested that change blindness might not actually signify the inability to detect a change, but rather the inability to be aware of detecting a change---changes might be implicitly detected. Here I critically examine this implicit change detection evidence. For each claim, I replicate the original finding and then offer an explicit explanation, suggesting that change detection may only result through explicit processes. I then provide evidence for three potential causes for change blindness, suggesting that change blindness is caused by the failure to form, maintain, or compare sufficient representations.
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