Final answer:
Change blindness is caused by a lack of visual awareness when attention is directed elsewhere. It exemplifies how attention is crucial for perception, as seen in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, and is different from disorders like prosopagnosia, which impair visual information processing.
Step-by-step explanation:
Change blindness occurs due to a lack of visual awareness. This happens when a person fails to notice large changes in a visual scene, often because their attention is directed elsewhere. Essentially, change blindness is a phenomenon where an individual does not perceive a change in a scene because the change does not align with where their attention is focused. This can occur even when the change is large or significant, as illustrated by the classic study where participants failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through a scene because they were counting basketball passes - an example of inattentional blindness.
In the case of prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, it is a disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. This deficit arises due to a failure in sensory perception, specifically the processing of visual information within the visual streams that extend from the primary visual cortex into the temporal and parietal lobes.
The fovea is responsible for acute vision because it has a high density of cones, which are necessary for seeing fine details and color. This part of the retina is integral for high-resolution central vision. Although the optic disc creates a physiological blind spot due to the absence of photoreceptors, there isn't a blind spot in our visual field as each eye compensates for the blind spot of the other.