Interesting article on how change blindness may impact the eye witness testimony
why change blindness happens?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-change-blindness-2795010
Legal Criminol Psychol - 2011 - Nelson - Change blindness can cause mistaken eyewitness identification
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Change blindness is due to a failure of attention, or more precisely we cannot multitask our attention. If we attend to two things at once, neither task gets 100% of our attention.
In famous change blindness experiments you are given a task such as counting basketball throws, this diverts attention away with taking in all that is happening - often leading to very strange and comical results.
Although with eyewitness testimony this comic nature is completely lost, since innocent bystanders can be accused.