Change They Can't Find: Change Blindness in Chimpanzees during a Visual Search Task

Abstract

Although considerable advances have been made in the study of change blindness in humans, research regarding change blindness in nonhuman animals has been rare thus far. Indeed, we do not know whether chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives, experience difficulty detecting changes in a stimulus when presentations are separated by blank displays. This study demonstrated that chimpanzees showed severe difficulties in detecting changes in a flicker-type visual search task, and these results are discussed in relation to the adaptive significance of change detection (e.g. the relationship between change blindness and vigilance behaviour).