Literature Review Change blindness is the inability to detect changes within a scene. Inattentional blindness occurs when people have difficulty perceiving stimuli if attention resources are focused elsewhere. Both of these phenomena were noted by Harvard psychologist William James who based his personal observations on our effort to “concentrate on some things to the exclusion of others (1890, as cited by Goldstein, 2012).” He went on to suggest that the perceptual system has a limited capacity to process information. James believed that in order not to overload the visual system, we purposely ignore some things in our environment so that full attention can be paid to others. A study demonstrating inattentional blindness was conducted by Simons and Chabris (1999). According to the researchers, our attention to the central interest of a scene inhibits the ability to perceive changes of marginal interest. In the studio, a video recording depicted a team dressed in black and a team dressed in white. Each team had a basketball that was passed around the group. Observers were asked to track the total number of passes made by a team or to track only the amount of aerial or bounced passes made by a team. Each task was assigned a difficulty level; easy and difficult respectively. During the observation, a woman with an umbrella or a woman dressed as a gorilla passed by the scene, which was an unexpected event. Nearly half of the observers did not notice the highly salient and unexpected event while they were engaged in the monitoring task. The results show that the primary task assigned to observers influenced how much more or less attention they paid to an unexpected event; more difficult primary tasks have made everything more difficult...... middle of paper ......and an advertisement, problems can arise and the consequences can be serious. If we don't actively look for a warning we may never see it. Besides warnings, how else can inattentional blindness be induced in reading material? As noted previously, most research on inattention and change blindness has focused primarily on how to detect change within a scene or notice something in a dynamic environment. What about inattentional blindness in reading? While we are so focused on reading our favorite piece of literature or doing reading assignments in class or at work, can we easily spot a change in character? Does the type of reading material matter in character change detection? The goal of this study is to observe how well people are able to detect character changes in reading material from the genre of American literature and also nonfiction science..