Blind to Change..?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10288008.stm
Recent news story covering work at Queen Mary’s uni London. Quite nice that they’ve put little video clips up of the stimulus so you can try to spot the differences yourself. I’d like to say I saw all three changes instantly, but if I’m being honest I didn’t see a single one. It wasn’t until it was pointed out to me that I saw it. Clearly I’m very ‘blind to change’. I’m not sure this is purley visual though, clearly the whole experiment is from an attentional perspective. Would be interesting to see if they’ve conducted it using the same paradigm within different sample populations. A fair amount of attentional work for example looks for attentional differences between people with autism and those without.
Also I wonder how applicable a 26 second clip of changing scenes can be to real life. If you were to change something subtle on a persons route to work for example it would most likely be quite obvious to them. As oppose to changing a fraction of a picture that they’d never seen before. The role of representational memory must be of some importance, a sort of template for expectation and an error feedback is what allows for noticing a change? Perhaps. Just waffling now.