Debriefing
All humans have parts of the visual field where there is no input because of scotomas, however people do not notice these blind spots. Joshua New and Brian Scholl of Yale University explain MIB by suggesting that when the visual system detects an element that is invariant despite changes that are occurring to a large region in the visual field, the visual system may expunge the stimulus from awareness. Ignoring stationary elements of a moving stimulus is an adaptation that helps compensate for parts of the visual field that don’t contain information, such as those that have scotomas. New and Scholl also confirmed that the stimuli don’t actually have to be moving to produce MIB, they just need to be changing. As long as the majority of stimuli in the scene are changing, stationary, unchanging stimuli will be treated like scotomas and be removed from awareness.