Final answer:
Change blindness is a demonstration of selective attention, where focused concentration on one task leads to a failure to notice significant changes within the visual field, as with the famous 'invisible gorilla' experiment by Simons and Chabris.
Step-by-step explanation:
Change blindness is related to selective attention as it exemplifies how our focus on certain stimuli can lead us to miss significant changes or events in our environment. Selective attention refers to our brain's ability to focus on a specific task or object, while change blindness indicates a lapse in noticing changes when our attention is directed elsewhere. The famous study by Simons and Chabris (1999), involving participants watching a video of a basketball game and failing to notice a person in a gorilla costume, is a well-known example demonstrating inattentional blindness, a form of change blindness. This study shows that when we are highly focused on a task, such as counting basketball passes, we may not notice even obvious changes or additions to the scene, like the gorilla. The concept of selective attention is further supported by experiments where participants focus on objects of a certain color and do not notice unexpected objects of a different color, such as a red cross, illustrating the powerful effect that directing our attention has on our perception.