Change Blindness in Intelligence: Effects of Attention Guidance by Instructions

We present a first effort to experimentally evaluate if, and how, the instructions given to an operator can cause significant effects regarding his/her change detection performance. The operator monitors a display looking for changes associated with specified target objects. The results show that a more differentiated monitoring instruction can cause a raised level of change blindness to occur for some of the displayed target object classes. We argue that the result will have implications for the intelligence function within military command and control.