Nothing compares 2 views: change blindness can occur despite preserved access to the changed information.

Change blindness, the failure to detect visual changes that occur during a disruption, has increasingly been used to infer the nature of internal representations. If every change were detected, detailed representations of the world would have to be stored and accessible. However, because many changes are not detected, visual representations might not be complete, and access to them might be limited. Using change detection to infer the completeness of visual representations requires an understanding of the reasons for change blindness. This article provides empirical support for one such reason: change blindness resulting from the failure to compare retained representations of both the pre- and postchange information. Even when unaware of changes, observers still retained information about both the pre- and postchange objects on the same trial.