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Attenuated Change Blindness for Exogenously Attended Items in a Flicker Paradigm
Abstract
When two scenes are alternately displayed, separated by a mask, even large, repeated changes between the scenes often go unnoticed for surprisingly long durations. Change blindness of this sort is attenuated at “centres of interest” in the scenes, however, supporting a theory of change blindness in which attention is necessary to perceive such changes (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). Problems with this measure of attentional selection - via verbally described “centres of interest” - are discussed, including worries about describability and explanatory impotence. Other forms of attentional selection, not subject to these problems, are employed in a “flicker” experiment to test the attention-based theory of change detection. Attenuated change blindness is observed at attended items when attentional selection is realized via involuntary exogenous capture of visual attention - to late-onset items and colour singletons - even when these manipulations are uncorrelated with the loci of the changes, and are thus irrelevant to the change detection task. These demonstrations ground the attention-based theory of change blindness in a type of attentional selection which is understood more rigorously than are “centres of interest”. At the same time, these results have important implications concerning the nature of exogenous attentional capture.
... However, this serial search process can be altered if a target has features that draw attention to itself (a phenomenon called attentional capture; Theeuwes, 1994). Specifically, a unique color or an abrupt onset is very effective at guiding search to the target and significantly speeding the otherwise slow, serial process (Scholl, 2000). When attention is captured or drawn to a stimulus, it means that it has properties that are processed prior to the arrival of attention (preattentively), drawing attention to that location for further analysis. ...
... The current findings of preattentive capture are comparable to those shown by Scholl's (Scholl, 2000) change blindness experiment. In his study, an array of line drawings of objects were shown and the target was either a color singleton (a single-colored line drawing among all Fig. 5 Averages of median reaction times for the four conditions. ...
... The same conclusion must be drawn from our study: the targets' salient properties (i.e., their unnatural colors) guided attention to their location, shortening the serial search. While Scholl's (Scholl, 2000) targets drew attention by virtue of a salient low-level feature, independently of the objects that had those features, our unnaturally colored targets had no special low-level feature that distinguished them from the other items in the display. Instead, the "oddness" of the unnaturally colored objects had a high level of semantic salience due to the MCE. ...
The expected color of an object influences how it is perceived. For example, a banana in a greyscale photo may appear slightly yellow because bananas are expected to be yellow. This phenomenon is known as the memory color effect (MCE), and the objects with a memory color are called "color-diagnostic." The MCE is theorized to be a top-down influence of color knowledge on visual perception. However, its validity has been questioned because most evidence for the MCE is based on subjective reports. Here a change detection task is used as an objective measure of the effect and the results show that change detection differs for color-diagnostic objects. Specifically, it was predicted and found that unnaturally colored color-diagnostic objects (e.g., a blue banana) would attract attention and thus be discovered more quickly and accurately. In the experiment, two arrays alternated with the target present in one array and absent in the other while all other objects remained unchanged. Participants had to find the target as quickly and accurately as possible. In the experimental condition, the targets were color-diagnostic objects (e.g., a banana) presented in either their natural (yellow) or an unnatural (blue) color. In the control condition, non-color-diagnostic objects (e.g., a mug) were presented with the same colors as the color-diagnostic objects. Unnaturally colored color-diagnostic objects were found more quickly, which suggests that the MCE is a top-down, preattentive process that can influence a nonsubjective visual perceptual task such as change detection.
... Moreover, adding motion transients to the change or its location may improve detection rates (see e.g. Klein, Kingstone, & Pontefract, 1992;Scholl, 2000;Zheng & McConkie, 2010). Since changes in electronic speed limits lack motion transients for most drivers, adding them might possibly attenuate change blindness. ...
... Together with the longer reaction times for those who did detect the change, participants appear to be distracted by the addition of motion in our study. While Klein and colleagues (1992), Scholl's (2000) and Zheng and McConkie's (2010) successful motion additions occurred prior to or together with the change, our additional motion cues highlighted the location postchange. The presence of the attention-demanding, artificially-added motion cues in our study may have hindered the processing of information contained in the signs. ...
... The effect of masking may (partially) be mitigated by introducing an artificial motion cue at the location of the change, to attract the participants' attention (Klein et al., 1992;Scholl, 2000;Uchida et al., 2011;Zheng & McConkie, 2010). However, the findings of the current study show that merely artificially redirecting attention towards the changed stimulus might not necessarily have the desired effect. ...
Reference:
Harms, I.M. (2021). Information along familiar routes: on what we perceive and how this affects our behaviour. (PhD dissertation, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands). doi: 10.33612/diss.151948918
Abstract:
Would you notice if the speed limit on an electronic road sign changes? Are we aware of the route instructions that we follow? How is it possible that we avoid an obstacle without being aware of it? The aim of this PhD dissertation is to provide insight in the cognitive processes involved in visual information processing of familiar traffic environments. What is seen and what is not. For this study, various research techniques were used, such as a driving simulator and an observational study. Most remarkable conclusion: we don't always notice, but in traffic we see more than we think.
Drivers as well as pedestrians typically reported an interest in other road users’ behaviour. Reporting changes in objects on or alongside a familiar road or pavement proved difficult. However, participants’ behavioural responses revealed they had perceived more information than they were aware of. They complied with a route diversion sign on a motorway or avoided a signboard on a pavement. Without having any recollection of this immediately afterwards.
People get used to familiar traffic environments so much that they don’t have to think about walking or driving with much conscious focus. They can act without thinking about it, so they don’t always even remember what they’ve done. Despite the apparent lack of full or even partial awareness, road information – including information that has changed in an otherwise familiar environment – may still guide behaviour. This outcome is also important for the way in which research on road users should be conducted.
... Such secondary visual signal may work as a distractor and add some costs to performance of the primary task of change detection (Lavie, 2006). On the other hand, a secondary visual signal presented together with the change may work as an exogenous visual cue attracting attention to the change location and facilitating change detection (Baker & Levin, 2015;Scholl, 2000;Smith, Lamont, & Henderson, 2013;Tse, Sheinberg, & Logothetis, 2003). When the secondary visual signal is relevant for the change, it attracts attention and increases change detection rate. ...
... When the secondary visual signal is irrelevant to the change, it may either not influence the change blindness rate or be detrimental for the change detection. Scholl (2000) used a flicker paradigm change detection task with late-onset items or color singletons that could co-occur with the change. Both manipulations worked as exogenous cues that captured attention. ...
... When these cues were relevant and attracted attention to the changed item location, the rate of the change detection increased. However, when the transient visual signal was presented at the non-changing item location, the change detection was not better compared to the control condition (Scholl, 2000). In sum, current research shows ambiguous results regarding the secondary visual signal influence on change blindness effect. ...
... First, both the method used in the previous chapters and that within the standard CB paradigm concern changes occurring across an interruption. determined which areas to define as Cl and which to define as MI (e.g., Zelinsky, 1998;Scholl, 2000). ...
... First, it may not necessarily be the case that a verbal description of the scene will correlate well with visual attention. Scholl (2000) highlights a number of reasons why this might not be so. A verbal description will be mediated by the ease of verbally describing certain parts of the image. ...
... A verbal description will be mediated by the ease of verbally describing certain parts of the image. For example, it is easy to name particular objects in a scene but it is unlikely people would describe "a blob-like area of the field in the background, defined by the area inside a bit of a tree-branch..." (Scholl, 2000). This does not necessarily mean that the area is not visually interesting or would not receive attention. ...
This thesis examines two distinct yet interrelated topics. One concerns the role of attention within 'Change Blindness' (CB) phenomena (e.g. Rensink, O'Regan & Clark, 1997). The second contrasts direct and indirect measures, to examine whether aspects of unattended visual stimuli, within CB and Inattentional Blindness' (IB) paradigms, that are seemingly inaccessible to awareness may nevertheless be implicitly extracted. A series of new experiments were conducted on the role of attention in CB. Pre-cueing subjects' attention to the locus of a change greatly reduced change blindness. Moreover, presenting a post-cue could also improve change detection. This evidence supports a role for attention in CB, but further suggests that more detailed visual information can be retained across brief interruptions than previously proposed. Further experiments with a modified CB paradigm examined whether there is a spontaneous attentional bias to attend to foreground rather than background items. These studies consistently found that changes were explicitly reported for foreground but not background items, consistent with default allocation of attention to the foreground. Regarding the second main topic of the thesis, a series of experiments demonstrated that Gestalt grouping may be implicitly extracted under conditions of 'inattention', despite the fact that such grouping may be unavailable for explicit report, as measured by standard IB indices. Such grouping may also be implicitly extracted even across saccadic eye movements. Further experiments showed that undetected background luminance-changes, or background motion, can also be implicitly extracted, and can influence explicit reports of foreground stimuli by inducing illusions for them. Although both IB and CB have been taken to suggest that little visual processing takes place outside the focus of attention, the present experiments suggest that considerable processing does take place, albeit implicitly.
... In the context of change detection, behavioral studies have investigated the role of attention on awareness, and it has been probed that cueing the relevant item before the potential change protects from CB (see Lamme, 2003). It has been suggested that in change detection experiments subjects may try to "sense" the change across the display as a whole, circumstance that could be ideal for exogenous attentional capture, which should be detectable as attenuated change blindness to exogenously attended items (Scholl, 2000). Accordingly, it has been observed using a flicker paradigm that late-onset items presented before the pre-change image captured attention exogenously and produced reduction of response times to detected changes in the image that contains it (Scholl, 2000). ...
... It has been suggested that in change detection experiments subjects may try to "sense" the change across the display as a whole, circumstance that could be ideal for exogenous attentional capture, which should be detectable as attenuated change blindness to exogenously attended items (Scholl, 2000). Accordingly, it has been observed using a flicker paradigm that late-onset items presented before the pre-change image captured attention exogenously and produced reduction of response times to detected changes in the image that contains it (Scholl, 2000). In line with these results, but using a one-shot paradigm, Smith and Schenk (2008) reported that peripheral cues transiently enhanced awareness at very short cue-change latencies (150 ms). ...
... However, these authors found that at 480 ms this effect was abolished. These findings suggest that objects that exogenously attract the observer's attention have a more detailed representation in working memory (Simons and Rensink, 2005) and subsequently decrease change blindness (Scholl, 2000). In a later study, Smith and Schenk (2010) observed that even the use of subliminal peripheral pre-change cues had a significant effect on the detection of changes. ...
Change detection is essential for visual perception and performance in our environment. However, observers often miss changes that should be easily noticed. A failure in any of the processes involved in conscious detection (encoding the pre-change display, maintenance of that information within working memory, and comparison of the pre and post change displays) can lead to change blindness. Given that unnoticed visual changes in a scene can be easily detected once attention is drawn to them, it has been suggested that attention plays an important role on visual awareness. In the present study, we used behavioral and electrophysiological (ERPs) measures to study whether the manipulation of retrospective spatial attention affects performance and modulates brain activity related to the awareness of a change. To that end, exogenous peripheral cues were presented during the delay period (retro-cues) between the first and the second array using a one-shot change detection task. Awareness of a change was associated with a posterior negative amplitude shift around 228–292 ms (“Visual Awareness Negativity”), which was independent of retrospective spatial attention, as it was elicited to both validly and invalidly cued change trials. Change detection was also associated with a larger positive deflection around 420–580 ms (“Late Positivity”), but only when the peripheral retro-cues correctly predicted the change. Present results confirm that the early and late ERP components related to change detection can be functionally dissociated through manipulations of exogenous retro-cueing using a change blindness paradigm.
... Toutes les études sur la cécité aux changements s'entendent sur un point : l'attention focalisée sur un objet est requise pour que son changement puisse être détecté (Hollingworth, Williams, & Henderson, 2001;Levin, Simons et al., 2002;Mondy & Coltheart, 2000;Noë & O'Regan, 2000;O'Regan, 2001;O'Regan et al., 2000;O'Regan et al., 1999;Rensink, 2000cRensink, , 2000dRensink, , 2002Scholl, 2000;Simons, 2000b;Simons & Ambinder, 2005;Williams & Simons, 2000), mais bien que nécessaire, celle-ci n'est pas un facteur suffisant à la représentation en mémoire des informations visuelles. Ainsi, la détection des changements n'est pas systématiquement assurée lorsque l'objet du changement est focalisé par l'oeil et/ou l'attention, comme en tel-00011364, version 1 -12 Jan 2006 témoignent plusieurs recherches O'Regan et al., 2000;Simons & Levin, 1998 Simons et al., 2002;Simons & Levin, 1998 pré-changement -masque -scène post-changement est répété jusqu'à ce que les sujets signalent un changement ou que 60 secondes se soient écoulées, comme le montre la Figure 6. ...
... Les recherches ayant étudié la représentation de scènes visuelles sous l'angle de la O'Regan, 2001;O'Regan et al., 2000;O'Regan et al., 1999; plus lumineux…), ce qui pourrait modérer le rôle de la saillance cognitive dans la représentation de l'information visuelle en mémoire (Scholl, 2000). Dans une récente étude, attribuer une priorité représentationnelle aux objets de la scène qui en permettent l'appréhension : l'intérêt sémantique de l'information favorise sa représentation et son accès conscient en mémoire. ...
... Or, l'on peut invoquer plusieurs facteurs pour rendre compte de ces estimations divergentes. Dans un premier temps, les durées utilisées dans la présentation des scènes pré-changement sont souvent très différentes et peuvent varier de 240 ms à 20 s (Hollingworth, 2003), et dans certaines études, les participants reçoivent pour consigne de « regarder minutieusement la scène en vue d'un test de mémoire ultérieur » (Hollingworth, 2003; Scholl, 2000;Shinoda et al., 2001;Simons, 1996;Simons & Chabris, 1999;Tatler et al., 2003;Werner & Bjorn, 2000;Williams & Simons, 2000), les autres envisagent des mesures alternatives, qui rendent compte des détections implicites de changements dont les participants n'ont pas forcément pris conscience (Fernandez-Duque & Hollingworth, 2003Hollingworth, , 2004; sous presse-b ; ...
This thesis examines how goals of task influence visual representations of scenes. We first investigated whether task-relevance and semantic-interest of visual information could influence visual representations of natural scenes. Results indicated that task-relevant information is extracted from the visual scene, processed and represented in memory more accurately than information of semantic interest. Results also provide arguments in favour of task-relevant information being coded within a task-related level whatever semantic interest. Secondly, we investigated the detailed rules for the task-related level of representation of visual scenes. Results indicated that task-related levels of representation are dynamic and code the information relevant to the demands of the current task. Then, this thesis provides a multinomial model of task influence on visual representation of scenes. The model aims to disentangle the amount of visual information that is extracted, processed and represented in memory when observers have to perform a task on visual scenes. Tested and validated with empirical data, the model shows that visual representations of scenes involve the visual information that is (i) relevant to the task (ii) directly relevant and necessary to the current task demands.
... As a result, we cannot process all of the information that enters our retina. A large body of work has investigated bottlenecks at various stages of visual processing, including but not limited to retinal organization (Carrasco et al., 2005;Kolb, 2011;Rosenholtz, 2016;, attention (Drew et al., 2013;Henderson & Hollingworth, 2003;Hollingworth & Henderson, 2000;Posner, 1980;Scholl, 2000;Smith et al., 2012;Wolfe & Gray, 2007), eye movements (Fehd & Seiffert, 2008;Henderson & Hollingworth, 1998;Rayner, 1975Rayner, , 1998Upadhyayula & Flombaum, 2020;Zelinsky, 2001;Zelinsky & Neider, 2008), and crowding (Levi, 2008;Whitney & Levi, 2011). Yet, our experience of the visual world seems rich and continuous. ...
... Flicker paradigms have been widely used in the literature to study change blindness in static images Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999;Hollingworth & Henderson, 2000;Rensink et al., 1997;Scholl, 2000;Simons, 2000;Simons & Levin, 1997;Simons & Rensink, 2005). In the flicker paradigm, an original image and a changed image are presented in rapid alternation in time separated by a brief blank image. ...
We investigated how sensitive visual processing is to spatiotemporal disruptions in ongoing visual events. Prior work has demonstrated that participants often miss spatiotemporal disruptions in videos presented in the form of scene edits or disruptions during saccades. Here, we asked whether this phenomenon generalizes to spatiotemporal disruptions that are not tied to saccades. In two flicker paradigm experiments, participants were instructed to identify spatiotemporal disruptions created when videos either jumped forward or backward in time. Participants often missed the jumps, and forward jumps were reported less frequently compared with backward jumps, demonstrating that a flicker paradigm produces effects similar to a saccade contingent disruption paradigm. These results suggest that difficulty detecting spatiotemporal disruptions is a general phenomenon that extends beyond trans-saccadic events.
... The observer's task is to judge whether the two images are the same or different with respect to some features of the image. It is well established that visual attention is very important for the success of change detection (Hollingworth, 2003(Hollingworth, , 2006Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002;Nakashima & Yokosawa, 2011Rensink, 2002;Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997;Scholl, 2000;Yokosawa & Mitsumatsu, 2003). Specifically, if observers focus their visual attention on a pre-change object to encode the object and then on the post-change object to retrieve the visual memory of the prechange object and compare it with the post-change object, they can detect the change of the object (Hollingworth, 2006;Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002). ...
... To examine the relationship between change detection and visual attention in detail, a number of studies have typically used a cueing paradigm wherein a visual cue is presented at one location and observers then orient attention to this cued location. Results usually show that change detection performance improves for object changes presented at the cued location, when cues were presented prior to a pre-change display (pre-cue: Li & Saiki, 2015; see also Scholl, 2000), during the time between pre-change and post-change displays (retro-cue: Berryhill, Richmond, Shay, & Olson, 2012;Landman, Spekreijse, & Lamme, 2003;Li & Saiki, 2015; see also Becker, Pashler, & Anstis, 2000), and with the post-change display (post-cue: Hollingworth, 2003; see also Luck & Vogel, 1997). ...
To investigate the effect of continuous focused attention on change detection, Nakashima & Yokosawa (2018) conducted a single object change detection task, manipulating blank durations and locations of study and test images (same/different). They suggested that attention can focus on a local area during a brief blank period, and that continuous focused attention facilitates only the detection of occurring change. We examined this suggestion further. To examine the possibility that observers strategically move attention during a long blank period rather than attention being spontaneously disengaged from a focused area, the image location condition was blocked. Additionally, the numbers of change trials and no-change trials were equated, in contrast to the larger number of change trials in the previous research. Even with these changes in method, our experiment showed that the change detection performance in the same location condition was better in the short blank than the long blank condition only in change trials. Thus, we suggested that attention certainly focuses on an area only briefly and facilitates change detection.
... First, the study hypothesized that reaction time would be longer for object change condition than location change condition because of the altered location information dominating altered object identity information (Becker & Rasmussen, 2008;Scholl, 2000). Therefore, the first hypothesis of the study was that reaction time should be slower in object change than location change detection. ...
... Second hypothesis was about the response time of the detection with respect to changing number of features, in other words, noticeability of change, which depends on the amount of alterations in the visual field. The literature about change detection indicates that increased density and saliency of alterations in the visual field facilitates the detection process (Scholl, 2000). In both location and object change conditions, the present hypothesis is that the decrease in the amount of change would require more time to detect, therefore increased reaction time. ...
Change detection is a function of visual attention and requires the persistent recognition of stimuli during the processing of the visual surrounding in terms of changing characteristics, onset and offset objects. Change blindness is a striking phenomenon that can be explained as missing the specific alterations in the visual field. The missing details of changed stimuli may interfere with change detection performance. In the present study, influence of type of change and load of change were examined on the accuracy and reaction time scores. Results indicated that reaction times in object (feature) change condition were significantly faster than location change condition. Also detecting three-change required less time than one-change alterations. In addition, accuracy of location change is higher than object change accuracy, and inconsistent with the prediction three-change accuracy was lower than one-change accuracy. Participants were not found to be sensitive to the specific task, in terms of type and amount of change. The correlation of accuracy and reaction time scores were independently examined with participants’ daily cognitive mistakes, and the results were insignificant. In line with the findings of previous studies, participants reacted faster to the change when there is more alterations in their visual field but with decreased accuracy. Moreover, detecting location change required more time with higher accuracy scores than feature change detection.
... The observer's task is to judge whether the two images are the same or different with respect to some features of the image. It is well established that visual attention is very important for the success of change detection (Hollingworth, 2003(Hollingworth, , 2006Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002;Nakashima & Yokosawa, 2011Rensink, 2002;Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997;Scholl, 2000;Yokosawa & Mitsumatsu, 2003). Specifically, if observers focus their visual attention on a pre-change object to encode the object and then on the post-change object to retrieve the visual memory of the prechange object and compare it with the post-change object, they can detect the change of the object (Hollingworth, 2006;Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002). ...
... To examine the relationship between change detection and visual attention in detail, a number of studies have typically used a cueing paradigm wherein a visual cue is presented at one location and observers then orient attention to this cued location. Results usually show that change detection performance improves for object changes presented at the cued location, when cues were presented prior to a pre-change display (pre-cue: Li & Saiki, 2015; see also Scholl, 2000), during the time between pre-change and post-change displays (retro-cue: Berryhill, Richmond, Shay, & Olson, 2012;Landman, Spekreijse, & Lamme, 2003;Li & Saiki, 2015; see also Becker, Pashler, & Anstis, 2000), and with the post-change display (post-cue: Hollingworth, 2003; see also Luck & Vogel, 1997). ...
What is the role of continuously focused attention on an object in change detection? To ensure focused attention on one object, we conducted a single object change detection task, manipulating an object’s location between pre-change and post-change displays (same or different location), and also manipulating a blank duration (the FOD task) and a pre-change object presentation duration (the FBD task). If attention is continuously focused at the spatial location of the pre-change object, a location shift of the post-change object should interrupt change detection due to a cognitive cost of attentional shift. Results suggest attention is focused continuously for a brief blank duration, and attention can facilitate the detection of change occurring at the location of attentional focus. Additionally, although attention is focused continuously for a long time if a target is visible, the effect of attention declines with time. The results clarify the new temporal characteristics of focused attention.
... Another possibility is that alcohol-related objects are simply more readily 'seen' by heavier than lighter drinkers. This possibility is suggested by work from outside of alcohol research (Rensink et al., 1997;Scholl, 2000), at least for the alcohol biases found in heavier compared to lighter social drinkers using the flicker paradigm for change detection (Jones et al., 2002(Jones et al., , 2003. Rensink et al. (1997) and Scholl (2000) have shown that visual changes are detected more quickly in the flicker paradigm when the object carrying the change is a 'centre of interest' and they concluded that attention to the object is necessary to perceive changes that relate to it. ...
... This possibility is suggested by work from outside of alcohol research (Rensink et al., 1997;Scholl, 2000), at least for the alcohol biases found in heavier compared to lighter social drinkers using the flicker paradigm for change detection (Jones et al., 2002(Jones et al., , 2003. Rensink et al. (1997) and Scholl (2000) have shown that visual changes are detected more quickly in the flicker paradigm when the object carrying the change is a 'centre of interest' and they concluded that attention to the object is necessary to perceive changes that relate to it. Strong support for this position comes from Turatto et al. (2003) who, using eye movements as an overt measure of attention allocation, have shown that change detection results from an active control over selection from the choices in the visual field rather than from a mechanism through which changes might be passively detected by casual eye movements painting the visual scene with a high resolution fovea, which serendipitously facilitates change detection when falling on the 'right' object at the 'right' time. ...
The findings obtained with the textual Stroop paradigm, testing for an attentional bias towards alcohol stimuli in heavier compared to lighter social drinkers, are limited in number and inconsistent in outcome. Using a pictorial rather than textual Stroop paradigm for the first time in alcohol research, a significant alcohol attentional bias is reported in heavier social drinkers compared to lighter social drinking controls. According to Cohen's scheme, the significant effect size is classified as ‘large'. The presence of an alcohol attentional bias helps to explain the perpetuation of abusive/dependent consumption and the frequency of post-treatment relapse. In a similar vein, these results add to the evidence that a differential alcohol attentional bias might also be present between two levels of social drinking and, in heavier social drinkers, has the potential to impact on the contents of awareness and the flow of thought towards alcohol. In this respect, it extends the small group of other perceptual-cognitive effects measured in social drinkers (alcohol cue reactions, alcohol associations and alcohol expectancies) that can influence the initiation of consumption in some social drinkers.
... Moreover, adding motion transients to the change or its location may improve detection rates (see e.g. Klein et al., 1992;Scholl, 2000;Zheng & McConkie, 2010). Since changes in electronic speed limits lack motion transients for most drivers, adding them might possibly attenuate change blindness. ...
... Together with the longer reaction times for those who did detect the change, participants appear to be distracted by the addition of motion in our study. While Klein and colleagues (1992), Scholl's (2000) and Zheng and McConkie's (2010) successful motion additions occurred prior to or together with the change, our additional motion cues highlighted the location post-change. The presence of the attention-demanding, artificially-added motion cues in our study may have hindered the processing of information contained in the signs. ...
Under certain circumstances, drivers fail to notice changes in electronic speed limits. A video-based study was performed to reveal which countermeasures would improve drivers' ability to detect changes in electronic speed limits. Countermeasures included leaving electronic signs blank prior to a speed limit change and adding motion signals by means of flashing amber lights or a wave. A video representing a motorway was shown repeatedly to 255 participants. They were instructed to press the space bar when detecting a change. The video was viewed 13 times before the speed limit changed. Results showed that leaving signs blank prior to the change instead of displaying speed limits continuously did not alter change detection, whereas flashers and waves eroded detection of the changed speed limit. This suggests that using flashers and waves to attract attention to electronic signs in fact decreases people's ability to process the information contained in the signs.
... Detection was best for the highly-salient/highly-relevant changes, with the exception that speed in this condition was not significantly different from the high-salience/low-relevance condition. As in previous studies reporting a change-detection modulation due to perceptual (eg Pringle et al 2001;Scholl 2000) or semantic properties (eg Auvray and O'Regan 2003;Kelley et al 2003;Rensink et al 1997Rensink et al , 2000Werner and Thies 2000), it seems that both salience and relevance are effective in controlling the deployment of visual attention. Salience and relevance within a scene are not merely intrinsic properties of each single object, but depend on the scene context. ...
... The salience effect we found is consistent with Scholl (2000) who used a precue, not predictive of the change location, to orient attention exogenously and registered a facilitation when the change occurred in the precued region. It is, nevertheless, in contrast with some other data. ...
Spotorno S, Faure S, 2007, "The role of perceptual salience, semantic relevance, and hemispheric asymmetry in detecting scene changes" Perception 36 ECVP Abstract Supplement
Change detection when transient signals are disturbed is often poor, but is modulated by top - down and bottom - up effects. In this study, we explored (i) the role of objects' perceptual salience and semantic relevance for the general meaning of a scene, with an original multiple-criterion method to evaluate these dimensions, and (ii) the hemispheric asymmetry in change perception using a new technique that combines one-shot change detection and tachistoscopically divided visual field. Realistic coloured scenes were presented centrally on the screen and thirty-two participants indicated whether a change occurred. Salience, relevance, and their interaction all affected both speed and accuracy; performance was worst for changes neither salient nor semantically relevant. However, only for low-salience changes did relevance affect speed. The RTs were shorter when a change occurred in the left visual field, suggesting a right-hemisphere advantage for detection of visual change. The theoretical implications are discussed, focusing on the processes that may underlie salience and semantic relevance effects together with the nature of the right-hemisphere contribution in change detection.
... Among the various phenomena that involve failures of visual awareness, inattentional blindness and change blindness have the most direct relevance to motorcycle crashes. Both are relatively easy to induce in laboratory experiments using a variety of stimuli, ranging from simple shapes and letters (Koivisto & Revonsuo, 2007, 2009Mack & Rock, 1998;Pashler, 1988;Scholl, 2000) to more complex stimuli including photographs, simulations and film clips (Haines, 1991;Pammer & Blink, 2013;Rensink et al., 1997;Shinoda, Hayhoe, Shrivastava, & 2001;Simons & Chabris, 1999). More importantly, both inattentional blindness and change blindness have been demonstrated to occur in realworld interactions (Chabris, Weinberger, Fontaine, & Simons, 2011;Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie, & Caggiano, 2010;Simons & Levin, 1998). ...
... For example, drivers are less likely to notice changes to road signs when they are completing a car-following task, compared to "normal" driving in which they must attend to road signs in order to obey road rules (Shinoda et al., 2001). Conversely, observers are better at detecting changes to items that were previously cued (Rensink et al., 1997) or items that captured exogenous attention, such as late-onset stimuli (Scholl, 2000). Semantic content and task-relevance also influence the likelihood and speed of detecting changes, because observers are more likely to attend to items that have greater personal or task relevance and this attention reduces change blindness. ...
... Since the resources of attention are limited, it is hypothesized that the cue helps to allocate attention to the change location, which causes the benefits in performance. Scholl (2000) performed an experiment to show that when attention is exogenously cued to the region of change detection improved. ...
... "Nichts erweitert so den Horizont, schenkt so viel Selbstvertrauen, wie Erfahrung! " (Sylvia Plath) (Becker, Pashler, & Anstis, 2000) (Gimmes, 1996) (Harris, McKee, & Watamaniuk, 1998) (Landman, Spekreijse, & Lamme, 2003) (Marrara & Moore, 2000) (Mazza, Turatto, & Umilta, 2005) (Posner, Snyder, & Davidson, 1980) (Pashler, 1988) (Rensink, 2000) (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997) (Sperling, 1960) (Theeuwes, Atchley, & Kramer, 1998) (Scholl, 2000) (Macmillan & Creelman, 1991) ) (Atchley, Kramer, Andersen, & Theeuwes, 1997) (Simons, 2000) (Rensink, 2002) (Han, Wan, & Humphrey, 2005) (Christou & Buelthoff, 2000) (Walraven & Janzen, 1983) (Spelke, 1990) (Grabbard, Hix, & Swan, 1999) (Fernandez-Duque & Thornton, 2000) (Chun & Jiang, 1998) ...
... The number of people with disabilities who are self-employed in Indonesia has reached 53.9%, and the most common disability is visual impairment. Visual impairment is a disability in which the sense of sight does not function normally as a channel for receiving information in daily activities (Scholl, 2000). ...
This open access volume analyses the challenges, problems and solutions of startups in times of global crises. It, first, provides an overview of the principles and fundamentals of successful entrepreneurship and startup development and talks about important resilience factors for meaningful entrepreneurship. Then, it analyses the findings and events that have come to light during the Covid-19 crisis and the Ukraine war. The volume discusses examples of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurship for startups and small businesses in various Asian countries and thereby also provides an international perspective. Against these discussions, the contributors talk about possible political framework conditions for successful entrepreneurship. The volume overall provides experts in the fields of organizational studies, well-being and resilience research, economic policy, economic promotion, and science with a useful resource that condenses and summarizes current economic crises, financial crises and political crises from the perspective of entrepreneurship. The findings produced here are the result of many years of international research cooperation between the contributors and the editor.
... Research on visual change perception similarly demonstrates that people are more likely to perceive changes that occur in more easily visible (Scholl, 2000), more interesting (Rensink et al., 1997), more centrally meaningful (Kelley et al., 2003), and more personally relevant (Jones et al., 2003;Triesch et al., 2003;Yaxley & Zwaan, 2005) parts of the scene-because such changes grab attention. By the converse logic, people miss otherwise obvious changes because their familiarity with nearby related stimuli can steal their attention (Neuhoff et al., 2014) and because long interstimulus presentation intervals can distort people's memory of the original state (Pashler, 1988). ...
I propose a flexible threshold theory of change perception in self and social judgment. Traditionally, change perception is viewed as a basic cognitive process entailing the act of discriminating informational differences. This article takes a more dynamic view of change perception, highlighting people’s motivations in interpreting those differences. Specifically, I propose people’s change perceptions depend not only on the salience and quality of the evidence for change but they also depend on the adaptation implications of the change, as people are sensitive to whether their prompted response would be worth it. Variables that exacerbate perceived adaptation implications should thus lead people to contract their change perception thresholds (people should become less open to concluding things have changed and so less likely to act), while variables that alleviate perceived adaptation implications should thus lead people to expand their change perception thresholds (people should become more open to concluding things have changed and so more likely to act), all else equal in the evidence. Moreover, these effects should emerge for perceiving declines and improvements alike so long as change bears on adaptation implications. I review support for these proposals and use the theory to generate novel predictions, contributions, and applications. The theory can explain anew why people respond (or fail to respond) to changing climates and economies, worsening personal health, growing social progress, and many other self and social phenomena. Change perception is more than an act of discriminating differences—it also entails people’s threshold judgments of whether and how these differences matter.
... Our visual processing must then overcome the bottlenecks by relying on the knowledge of the world and making suitable inferences about the world. For example, change blindness in natural scenes has been shown to be mediated by the underlying semanticschanges to semantically inconsistent objects with the scene are detected faster than semantically consistent objects (Hollingworth & Henderson, 2000;Rensink, O'regan, & Clark, 1997;Scholl, 2000). Similarly, Smith and Henderson (2008) demonstrated that edit blindness is higher when edits happen during an ongoing action compared to the edits between the scenes. ...
Prior research on film viewing has demonstrated that participants frequently fail to notice spatiotemporal disruptions, such as scene edits in the movies. Whether such insensitivity to spatiotemporal disruptions extends beyond scene edits in film viewing is not well understood. Across three experiments, we created spatiotemporal disruptions by presenting participants with minute long movie clips, and occasionally jumping the movie clips ahead or backward in time. Participants were instructed to press a button when they noticed any disruptions while watching the clips. The results from experiments 1 and 2 indicate that participants failed to notice the disruptions in continuity about 10% to 30% of the time depending on the magnitude of the jump. In addition, detection rates were lower by approximately 10% when the videos jumped ahead in time compared to the backward jumps across all jump magnitudes, suggesting a role of knowledge about the future affects jump detection. An additional analysis used optic flow similarity during these disruptions. Our findings suggest that insensitivity to spatiotemporal disruptions during film viewing is influenced by knowledge about future states.
... In the flicker paradigm, participants are presented with two versions of a scene presented cyclically with a blank screen between each presentation 7 . The blank screen causes change blindness 8 , and observers need to attend to the changing object to see the change 9 . The current experiments compared the time to find changes that were gaze targets to changes that were not. ...
Introduction: Observers often pay attention to objects that are the target of another’s gaze. The current experiments investigate if memory for gaze cues has similar effects on attention. Methods: We used the flicker paradigm, in which participants searched for changes in pictures of real-world scenes. In experiment 1, half of the scenes depicted a person looking at the changing object, and the other half depicted no people. In experiment 2, none of the scenes in the flicker sequence contained people, but participants previewed pictures prior to the flicker sequence, and half of the previews depicted a person looking at the changing object. Results: In both experiments, participants were faster to find changes when the changes were cued (Exp 1, t(20) = 2.55, p = .02; Exp 2, t(49) = 7.18, p < .001). Analysis of accuracy suggests it was not due to a speed-accuracy tradeoff. Conclusions: These results suggest that memory for gaze cues may help guide attention. However, the results do not suggest one way or the other whether this effect is reflexive or unique to social cues.
... Although somewhat artificial in relation to the real world, these types of carefully controlled experiments are necessary in order the isolate the study of attention/ perception from other cognitive processes (Luck and Vogel 1997;Rensink 2000c;Scott-Brown et al. 2000). In order to provide greater realism without the full complexity of real-world stimuli, other researchers have used drawings of objects and/or scenes that can be as simple as arrays of line-based sketches to full-color computer renderings showing complete scenarios (Simons 1996;Henderson and Hollingworth 1999;Scholl 2000;Williams and Simons 2000). Although drawings of objects and scenes can be useful in studying change detection, some researchers have argued that drawings create an artificial parsing of a scene. ...
Due to the dynamic nature of construction sites, workers face constant changes, including changes that endanger their safety. Failing to notice significant changes to visual scenes-known as change blindness-can potentially put construction workers into harm's way. Hence, understanding the inability or failure to detect change is critical to improving worker safety. No study to date, however, has empirically examined change blindness in relation to construction safety. To address this critical knowledge gap, this study examined the effects of change types (safety-relevant or safety-irrelevant) and work experience on hazard-identification performance, with a focus on fall-related hazards. The experiment required participants (construction workers, students with experience, and students with no work experience) to detect changes between two construction scenario images that alternated repeatedly and then identify any changes. The results demonstrated that, generally, safety-relevant changes were detected significantly faster than safety-irrelevant changes, with certain types of fall hazards (e.g., unprotected edge hazards) being detected faster than other types (e.g., ladder hazards). The study also found that more experienced subjects (i.e., workers) achieved higher accuracy in detecting relevant changes, but their mean response time was significantly longer than that of students with and without experience. Collectively, these findings indicated that change blindness may influence changes in workers' situation awareness on jobsites. Demonstrating workers' susceptibility to change blindness can help raise awareness during worker trainings about how workers allocate and maintain attention.
... Many researchers have interpreted change blindness as probing the limits of perception or memory without attention (e.g.. Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002;O'Regan, 1992;O'Regan, Rensink, & Clark, 1999;Rensink et al., 1997;Scholl, 2000). Supposedly, the observer manipulates a spotlight of attention, and perception is richer within that spotlight than outside of it. ...
Human beings subjectively experience a rich visual percept. However, when behavioral experiments probe the details of that percept, observers perform poorly, suggesting that vision is impoverished. What can explain this awareness puzzle? Is the rich percept a mere illusion? How does vision work as well as it does? This paper argues for two important pieces of the solution. First, peripheral vision encodes its inputs using a scheme that preserves a great deal of useful information, while losing the information necessary to perform certain tasks. The tasks rendered difficult by the peripheral encoding include many of those used to probe the details of visual experience. Second, many tasks used to probe attentional and working memory limits are, arguably, inherently difficult, and poor performance on these tasks may indicate limits on decision complexity. Two assumptions are critical to making sense of this hypothesis: (1) All visual perception, conscious or not, results from performing some visual task; and (2) all visual tasks face the same limit on decision complexity. Together, peripheral encoding plus decision complexity can explain a wide variety of phenomena, including vision’s marvelous successes, its quirky failures, and our rich subjective impression of the visual world.
... Thus, the RISE paradigm assesses participants' "recognition" of the animals amid a cluttered sensory environment. The flicker paradigm, however, allows detailed exploration of the mechanisms of "focused attention," because change blindness is reduced by exogenous cues at the location of the change (Scholl, 2000). This procedure can thus provide insight on humans' sensitivity to snakes under visual conditions, which accurately simulate the humans' ability to detect snakes or lizards in natural environments. ...
Threat detection is crucial to survival. Studies using unnatural visual scene settings (i.e. visual search tasks) have shown that humans and primates are able to identify snakes more quickly than they are able to identify other animals. The present study employed a flicker paradigm task to assess whether humans detect snakes more accurately and rapidly than they do other reptiles in natural scene settings. Participants watched a long series of images, consisting of pairs of complex natural scenes. A blank interval was inserted between the two versions of the scene, showing only the scene and the scene plus an added animal (snake or lizard). Participants detected scene changes featuring the snake targets more accurately and rapidly than those with lizard targets. This finding supports the view that there were evolutionary pressures for a visual system which prioritised human detection of snakes.
... It can arise from failures at any of the stages of processing involved in change detection: encoding, retention, retrieval, comparison of the pre-and post-change items, and report Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). The engagement of focused attention has emerged as an important condition of successful change detection (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997;Scholl, 2000). This claim has also received neuropsychological support. ...
Research in the field of embodied cognition has shown that sensorimotor simulation significantly influences various aspects of cognitive processing. This experiment was designed to test the impact of the sensorimotor simulation of objects’ physical proprieties, initiated by the preceding verbal context, on change detection performance. Before performing each of change detection trials, participants were exposed to sentences suggesting a particular object orientation (horizontal or vertical). The orientation in the first display of the objects that were to be replaced in the second was also manipulated. Response latencies results show that the sentences implying the same spatial orientation as that of the to-be-changed object led to a faster detection of its change compared to the sentences that implied the mismatching orientation, an effect that we explain in terms of the superior encoding, facilitated by sensorimotor simulation, of the objects with matching orientation.
... p 2 ϭ .108. This pattern is consistent with the capture of attention by the memory matching item, leading to a higher probability of memory encoding for the color of the search item (Schmidt, Vogel, Woodman, & Luck, 2002;Scholl, 2000) or to the ...
In five experiments, we examined whether a task-irrelevant item in visual working memory (VWM) interacts with perceptual selection when VWM must also be used to maintain a template representation of a search target. This question is critical to distinguishing between competing theories specifying the architecture of interaction between VWM and attention. The single-item template hypothesis (SIT) posits that only a single item in VWM can be maintained in a state that interacts with attention. Thus, the secondary item should be inert with respect to attentional guidance. The multiple-item template hypothesis (MIT) posits that multiple items can be maintained in a state that interacts with attention; thus, both the target representation and the secondary item should be capable of guiding selection. This question has been addressed previously in attention capture studies, but the results have been ambiguous. Here, we modified these earlier paradigms to optimize sensitivity to capture. Capture by a distractor matching the secondary item in VWM was observed consistently across multiple types of search task (abstract arrays and natural scenes), multiple dependent measures (search reaction time (RT) and oculomotor capture), multiple memory dimensions (color and shape), and multiple search stimulus dimensions (color, shape, common objects), providing strong support for the MIT.
... It is therefore important to establish that the effect of mental state attribution can be observed using other measures of performance. Change detection tasks are more sensitive to behavioural changes [17] and less susceptible to noise [18] than response time tasks and highly sensitive to attention, such that participants are significantly more accurate at identifying changes that occur at a cued location [19][20][21], thus giving us the best possible chance of observing subtle modulations of cueing that may be lost in RT tasks. ...
Understanding the mental states of our social partners allows us to successfully interact with the world around us. Mental state attributions are argued to underpin social attention, and have been shown to modulate attentional orienting to social cues. However, recent research has disputed this claim, arguing that this effect may arise as an unintentional side effect of study design, rather than through the involvement of mentalising processes. This study therefore aimed to establish whether the mediation of gaze cueing by mental state attributions generalises beyond the specific experimental paradigm used in previous research. The current study used a gaze cueing paradigm within a change detection task, and the gaze cue was manipulated such that participants were aware that the cue-agent was only able to ‘see’ in one condition. The results revealed that participants were influenced by the mental state of the cue-agent, and were significantly better at identifying if a change had occurred on valid trials when they believed the cue-agent could ‘see’. The computation of the cue-agent’s mental state therefore mediated the gaze cueing effect, demonstrating that the modulation of gaze cueing by mental state attributions generalises to other experimental paradigms.
... The role of covert attention in change detection has been highlighted in previous studies. For example, Scholl (2000), and D. T. Smith and Schenk (2008) showed that presenting visual precues known to produce covert shifts of attention, facilitates change detection when the precues are shown at the change location. In contrast, if the precued location does not contain the change, covert attention shifts would be detrimental to change detection. ...
People often miss salient events that occur right in front of them. This phenomenon, known as change blindness, reveals the limits of visual awareness. Here, we investigate the role of implicit processing in change blindness using an approach that allows partial dissociation of covert and overt attention. Traditional gaze-contingent paradigms adapt the display in real time according to current gaze position. We compare such a paradigm with a newly designed mouse-contingent paradigm where the visual display changes according to the real-time location of a user-controlled mouse cursor, effectively allowing comparison of change detection with mainly overt attention (gaze-contingent display; Experiment 2) and untethered overt and covert attention (mouse-contingent display; Experiment 1). We investigate implicit indices of target detection during change blindness in eye movement and behavioral data, and test whether affective devaluation of unnoticed targets may contribute to change blindness. The results show that unnoticed targets are processed implicitly, but that the processing is shallower than if the target is consciously detected. Additionally, the partial untethering of covert attention with the mouse-contingent display changes the pattern of search and leads to faster detection of the changing target. Finally, although it remains possible that the deployment of covert attention is linked to implicit processing, the results fall short of establishing a direct connection.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.3758/s13414-017-1468-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
... It has also been frequently shown that spatial cues attenuate change blindness (Becker, Pashler, & Anstis, 2000;Scholl, 2000;Tse, Sheinberg, & Logothetis, 2003), the effect extending even to change detection in the opposite hemifield (Tse et al., 2003). Interestingly, however, their facilitatory effect can be short-lived, spanning only a few hundred milliseconds after which it is diminished (Smith & Schenk, 2008). ...
... Factors that draw attention to an object increase the likelihood of detecting changes to it, while reducing the detection of changes elsewhere. If a verbal cue indicates the identity of a change before its occurrence, or a visual cue draws attention to the changed object, detection is greatly facilitated (Rensink et al., 1997;Scholl, 2000). Having more objects in the display delays detection of a change in one object due to increased attentional scanning (Zelinsky, 2001), and when several objects change location, people usually detect the movement of only one (McConkie and Loschky, 2000). ...
Change blindness is the tendency to fail to detect changes in a stimulus array while actively exploring it. This happens when the perception of the motion that typically accompanies stimulus change is prevented or disrupted.
... Ve "flicker" paradigmatu bude mít sekvence podobu: A-Z-A*-Z-A-Z-A*…A-Z-A*, sekvence se u jednoho podnětu opakuje do uplynutí stanoveného času, zpravidla 60 sekund, poté následuje další podnět (např. Gusev & Mikhaylova, 2013;Porubanová-Norquist & Šikl, 2013;Scholl, 2000). ...
The thesis is focused on the theoretical constructs of individualism and collectivism (Triandis, 1996)
and of analytic/holistic perception (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003) and their mutual relationship. Scale
INDCOL translated by Bartoš (2010) was used to measure individualism/collectivism, three different
methods were used to measure cognitive style – FLT method (Kitayama et al., 2003), CBS method to
investigate the ability to detect changes (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006), and FAB method that is based on
manipulation with focal object and background (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). The test battery was
administered on the sample of Czech and Czech Vietnamese (N = 92), the FLT and FAB methods were
also administered on Chinese sample (N = 47). Czech and Czech Vietnamese significantly differ in
three out of four subscales of INDCOL and it can be said that Czech Vietnamese consider themselves
to be relatively more oriented on cooperation, on meeting one's obligations to others, and also to be
more unique and independent. The results of the FLT method show clearly analytic cognitive style in
all three national groups, which is relatively more distinct in the Czech and Czech Vietnamese groups
compared to the Chinese group. The results of the CBS and FAB method are inconsistent and it is
impossible to distinguish a specific cognitive style, as it is theoretically defined, in any of the groups.
No significant correlation was found among the scores of INDCOL and the other administered
methods. The obtained results are discussed, the limits of the study are described and further ways
of research of the problematics are suggested.
... They suggested that this top-down control included a facilitatory process that was enhancing all non-changed items. Other top-down factors determining whether a color change captures attention include task demand (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Wright, 1994;Schmidt & Schmidt, 2010;Scholl, 2000;Theeuwes & Burger, 1998). Note that some of these studies used a different methodology to assess capture effects and hence they won't be further discussed here. ...
Previous studies have shown that a sudden color change is typically less salient in capturing attention than the onset of a new object. Von Mühlenen, Rempel, and Enns (Psychological Science 16: 979-986, 2005) showed that a color change can capture attention as effectively as the onset of a new object given that it occurs during a period of temporal calm, where no other display changes happen. The current study presents a series of experiments that further investigate the conditions under which a change in color captures attention, by disentangling the change signal from the onset of a singleton. The results show that the item changing color receives attentional priority irrespective of whether this change goes along with the appearance of a singleton or not.
... Investigations into how change blindness works has found four critical findings: (1) Observers who expect that they may be shown a change are more likely to detect it than observers for whom the change is completely unexpected (Mack & Rock, 1998). (2) When deliberately searching for changes, changes to an object in a scene are only detected if they occur while the object is attended (Scholl, 2000). (3) Changes to elements of a scene important to the meaning of the scene are detected more than elements of a scene that are incidental to the scene's meaning (Hollingworth & Henderson, 2003). ...
As CCTV cameras are used more and more often to increase security in communities, police are spending a larger proportion of their resources, including time, in processing CCTV images when investigating crimes that have occurred (Levesley & Martin, 2005; Nichols, 2001). As with all tasks, there are ways to approach this task that will facilitate performance and other approaches that will degrade performance, either by increasing errors or by unnecessarily prolonging the process. A clearer understanding of psychological factors influencing the effectiveness of footage review will facilitate future training in best practice with respect to the review of CCTV footage. The goal of this report is to provide such understanding by reviewing research on footage review, research on related tasks that require similar skills, and experimental laboratory research about the cognitive skills underpinning the task. The report is organised to address five challenges to effectiveness of CCTV review: the effects of the degraded nature of CCTV footage, distractions and interrupts, the length of the task, inappropriate mindset, and variability in people’s abilities and experience. Recommendations for optimising CCTV footage review include (1) doing a cognitive task analysis to increase understanding of the ways in which performance might be limited, (2) exploiting technology advances to maximise the perceptual quality of the footage (3) training people to improve the flexibility of their mindset as they perceive and interpret the images seen, (4) monitoring performance either on an ongoing basis, by using psychophysiological measures of alertness, or periodically, by testing screeners’ ability to find evidence in footage developed for such testing, and (5) evaluating the relevance of possible selection tests to screen effective from ineffective screeners
... Investigations into how change blindness works has found four critical findings: (1) Observers who expect that they may be shown a change are more likely to detect it than observers for whom the change is completely unexpected (Mack & Rock, 1998). (2) When deliberately searching for changes, changes to an object in a scene are only detected if they occur while the object is attended (Scholl, 2000). (3) Changes to elements of a scene important to the meaning of the scene are detected more than elements of a scene that are incidental to the scene's meaning (Hollingworth & Henderson, 2003). ...
This literature review was commissioned to explore the psychological literature relating to facial image comparison with a particular emphasis on whether individuals can be trained to improve performance on this task. Surprisingly few studies have addressed this question directly. As a consequence, this review has been extended to cover training of face recognition and training of different kinds of perceptual comparisons where we are of the opinion that the methodologies or findings of such studies are informative. The majority of studies of face processing have examined face recognition, which relies heavily on memory. This may be memory for a face that was learned recently (e.g. minutes or hours previously) or for a face learned longer ago, perhaps after many exposures (e.g. friends, family members, celebrities). Successful face recognition, irrespective of the type of face, relies on the ability to retrieve the to-berecognised face from long-term memory. This memory is then compared to the physically present image to reach a recognition decision. In contrast, in face matching task two physical representations of a face (live, photographs, movies) are compared and so long-term memory is not involved. Because the comparison is between two present stimuli rather than between a present stimulus and a memory, one might expect that face matching, even if not an easy task, would be easier to do and easier to learn than face recognition. In support of this, there is evidence that judgment tasks where a presented stimulus must be judged by a remembered standard are generally more cognitively demanding than judgments that require comparing two presented stimuli Davies & Parasuraman, 1982; Parasuraman & Davies, 1977; Warm and Dember, 1998). Is there enough overlap between face recognition and matching that it is useful to look at the literature recognition? No study has directly compared face recognition and face matching, so we turn to research in which people decided whether two non-face stimuli were the same or different. In these studies, accuracy of comparison is not always better when the comparator is present than when it is remembered. Further, all perceptual factors that were found to affect comparisons of simultaneously presented objects also affected comparisons of successively presented objects in qualitatively the same way. Those studies involved judgments about colour (Newhall, Burnham & Clark, 1957; Romero, Hita & Del Barco, 1986), and shape (Larsen, McIlhagga & Bundesen, 1999; Lawson, Bülthoff & Dumbell, 2003; Quinlan, 1995). Although one must be cautious in generalising from studies of object processing to studies of face processing (see, e.g., section comparing face processing to object processing), from these kinds of studies there is no evidence to suggest that there are qualitative differences in the perceptual aspects of how recognition and matching are done. As a result, this review will include studies of face recognition skill as well as face matching skill. The distinction between face recognition involving memory and face matching not involving memory is clouded in many recognition studies which require observers to decide which of many presented faces matches a remembered face (e.g., eyewitness studies). And of course there are other forensic face-matching tasks that will require comparison to both presented and remembered comparators (e.g., deciding whether any person in a video showing a crowd is the target person). For this reason, too, we choose to include studies of face recognition as well as face matching in our review
... One thing that is apparent for VSTM comparison tasks such as change and sameness detection is the role played by attention. Sensitivity to change or to sameness events tends to dramatically increase when attention, through cueing or other methods, is directed to the location of the relevant item (Rensink et al., 1997;Scholl, 2000;Smith & Schenk, 2008;Tse, 2004;Wilson & Goddard, 2011). What aspect(s) of VSTM processing are susceptible to such a spatial attentional influence? ...
We investigated how dimension-based attention influences visual short-term memory (VSTM). This was done through examining the effects of cueing a feature dimension in two perceptual comparison tasks (change detection and sameness detection). In both tasks, a memory array and a test array consisting of a number of colored shapes were presented successively, interleaved by a blank interstimulus interval (ISI). In Experiment 1 (change detection), the critical event was a feature change in one item across the memory and test arrays. In Experiment 2 (sameness detection), the critical event was the absence of a feature change in one item across the two arrays. Auditory cues indicated the feature dimension (color or shape) of the critical event with 80 % validity; the cues were presented either prior to the memory array, during the ISI, or simultaneously with the test array. In Experiment 1, the cue validity influenced sensitivity only when the cue was given at the earliest position; in Experiment 2, the cue validity influenced sensitivity at all three cue positions. We attributed the greater effectiveness of top-down guidance by cues in the sameness detection task to the more active nature of the comparison process required to detect sameness events (Hyun, Woodman, Vogel, Hollingworth, & Luck, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35; 1140-1160, 2009).
... Previous studies suggest that attention facilitates the encoding of items into VWM, but they fall short of demonstrating equivalence between attention and VWM. For instance, Schmidt, Vogel, Woodman, and Luck (2002) showed that shifting attention to a particular spatial location increases the probability that the item at that location will be encoded and retained (see also, Averbach & Coriell, 1961;Scholl, 2000;Sperling, 1960). In addition, objects that capture attention are preferentially consolidated into VWM (Belopolsky, Kramer, & Godijn, 2008;Infanti, Hickey, & Turatto, 2015). ...
There is substantial debate over whether visual working memory (VWM) and visual attention constitute a single system for the selection of task-relevant perceptual information or whether they are distinct systems that can be dissociated when their representational demands diverge. In the present study, we focused on the relationship between visual attention and the encoding of objects into VWM. Participants performed a color change-detection task. During the retention interval, a secondary object, irrelevant to the memory task, was presented. Participants were instructed either to execute an overt shift of gaze to this object (Experiments 1-3) or to attend it covertly (Experiments 4 and 5). Our goal was to determine whether these overt and covert shifts of attention disrupted the information held in VWM. We hypothesized that saccades, which typically introduce a memorial demand to bridge perceptual disruption, would lead to automatic encoding of the secondary object. However, purely covert shifts of attention, which introduce no such demand, would not result in automatic memory encoding. The results supported these predictions. Saccades to the secondary object produced substantial interference with VWM performance, but covert shifts of attention to this object produced no interference with VWM performance. These results challenge prevailing theories that consider attention and VWM to reflect a common mechanism. In addition, they indicate that the relationship between attention and VWM is dependent on the memorial demands of the orienting behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record
... Many studies show that an observer in this situation has a difficulty detecting the change. The term change blindness was coined to describe a failure to notice even remarkable changes assured by the disruption of the visual continuity in the scene by presenting a change during eye movement (Bridgeman, Hendry, Stark, 1975;Hollingworth, Schrock, Henderson, 2001;Pashler, 1988), inserting a brief blank in between scenes (Fernandez-Duque et al., 2003;McCarley et al., 2004;Rensink, O'Regan, Clark, 1997Richard et al., 2002;Scholl, 2000;Simons, Rensink, 2005), using "mudsplashes" (O'Regan, Rensink, Clark, 1999) or presenting a gradual change (Simons, Franconeri, Reimer, 2000), or movie cuts (Levin, Simons, 1996). ...
Change blindness represents extreme difficulty in detecting changes in the visual field induced by brief blank screen interjected in between two alternating images. In the process of searching for a change, visual saliency certainly plays an important role in attracting attention (i.e., pop-out effect). In our study, we were interested in whether there are high-level scene factors that might attract attention as well. As hypothesized, probable, central, relevant and within the figure changes were detected more easily than changes that were improbable, marginal, irrelevant and occurring within the background. Interestingly, detecting changes occurring within close proximity of the figure was most difficult. This indicates that when searching for changes in scenes, parts of the scenes close to the most powerful attractors are being shadowed, and therefore seem to be ignored by selective attention. This could be ascribed to the role of expectations in change detection task. Therefore, we believe that specifically in explicit change detection task, an individual might use certain heuristics that helps her/him scan the scene. The data are discussed in the context of the debate about the nature of scene representations.
... Many studies show that an observer in this situation has a difficulty detecting the change. The term change blindness was coined to describe a failure to notice even remarkable changes due to disruption in visual continuity by presenting a change during eye movements (Bridgeman, Hendry, & Stark, 1975;Hollingsworth, Schrock & Henderson, 2001;Pashler, 1988), inserting a brief blank in between scenes (Fernandez-Duque, Grossi, Thornton, & Neville, 2003;McCarley et al., 2004;Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997Scholl, 2000;Simons & Rensink, 2005), using "mudsplashes" (O'Regan, Rensink, & Clark, 1999), presenting a gradual change (Simons, Franconeri, & Reiner, 2000), or movie cuts (Levin & Simons, 1997;Simons, 1996). ...
The study aims to introduce and explain newly discovered phenomenon of change blindness, inability to detect remarkable changes. Rather than focusing on successful detection of changes, failure to detect large changes will be discussed. Change blindness is being induced through many designs (flicker, one-shot, mudsplashes, movie cuts), whereas in the study flicker and one-shot are being described into details. The main reasons of why change blindness happens are proposed, and the cognitive and executive processes underlying change blindness are described. The attempt to show that change blindness occurs both in laboratory, as well in real environment is demonstrated through examples of many research studies. Therefore, the implication offered by change blindness could help us clarify and understand the processing of visual information. Change blindness could help us understand persistent dilemma in psychology - the role of bottom-up and top-down processes.
People with visual impairment have limitations in carrying out socioeconomic activities. The entrepreneurial initiative is an attempt to encourage the active participation of visually impaired people in improving their socioeconomic status. Managing motivation is essential for increasing the self-confidence and potential of people with visual impairments. Storytelling is a method that is considered capable of providing cognitive stimulation to visually impaired persons to generate entrepreneurial motivation. Thus, this study aims to identify the effectiveness of the storytelling method in increasing the entrepreneurial motivation of visually impaired people. This study used a quasi-experimental design by comparing treatment and control groups. Statistical analysis was performed to test the results of the pre- and post-tests. This study was conducted at a social institution in Indonesia for the visually impaired. The results of this study show that direct storytelling is an effective method for increasing entrepreneurial motivation in people with visual impairments. Statistical tests showed a difference between the experimental and control groups after the storytelling intervention, significantly increasing entrepreneurial motivation. This study provides new insights into entrepreneurship by using a storytelling method. This study also presents policy implications for developing empowerment models for persons with disabilities, particularly the entrepreneurial approach for visually impaired people.
INTRODUCTION
We present to you a publication, encompassing issues which are important for education and attitudes shaping of drivers. The authors of particular chapters presented the results of their research, often conducted for many years. You can familiarize yourselves with the influence of various factors on behavior and abili-ties of drivers. The study attempts to define the following issues:
how the talking on the phone impacts the response time,
how do the drivers assess their own behavior and the behavior of other roads users and what variables influence the differentiation of assessment results, such as: gender (men, women), age (younger and older drivers), driving seniority (little experience, many years of experience), purpose of using a car (amateurs, professionals);
how to associate the personality traits with most frequently occurring risky behaviors;
what are the major barriers determining driving skills.
The article presents the way of measuring and the device enabling the meas-urement of visual receptor's efficiency in conditions of exposure to various stimu-li, while at the same time limiting the influence of individual perception.
Moreover, the analysis of individual behavioral patterns and experiences relat-ed to working in a group of drivers was made.
The authors of this monograph characterized a number of aspects which are crucial for analysis of drivers’ psychophysical abilities. We hope that it will enrich your experience, and using this knowledge in practice will certainly contribute to the improvement of road safety.
Editors
Patients with spatial neglect show an ipsilesional exploration bias. We developed a gaze-contingent intervention that aims at reducing this bias and tested its effects on visual exploration in healthy participants: During a visual search, stimuli in one half of the search display are removed when the gaze moves into this half. This leads to a relative increase in the exploration of the other half of the search display – the one that can be explored without impediments. In the first experiment, we tested whether this effect transferred to visual exploration during a change detection task (under change blindness conditions), which was the case. In a second experiment, we modified the intervention (to an intermittent application) but the original version yielded more promising results. Thus, in the third experiment, the original version was used to test the longevity of its effects and whether its repeated application produced even stronger results. To this aim, we compared two groups: the first group received the intervention once, the second group repeatedly on three consecutive days. The change detection task was administered before the intervention and at four points in time after the last intervention (directly afterwards, + 1 h, + 1 day, and +4 days). The results showed long-lasting effects of the intervention, most pronounced in the second group. Here the intervention changed the bias in the visual exploration pattern significantly until the last follow-up. We conclude that the intervention shows promise for the successful application in neglect patients.
It is an orthodoxy in cognitive science that perception can occur unconsciously. Recently, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters and Ian Phillips have argued that this orthodoxy may be mistaken. They argue that many purported cases of unconscious perception fail to rule out low degrees of conscious awareness while others fail to establish genuine perception. This paper presents a case of unconscious perception that avoids these problems. It also advances a general principle of ‘phenomenal coherence’ that can insulate some forms of evidence for unconscious perception from the methodological critiques of Lau, Peters and Phillips.
This study examined if contextual priming influences a person's ability to detect changes in visual stimuli. Participants were primed with a paragraph that was related or unrelated to the picture that followed, and then tested using the flicker paradigm (Rensink, O'Reagan, & Clark, 1997) to see if priming affected detection times of changing items. It was found that the related and unrelated priming conditions had significantly faster detection times than the neutral prime condition.
The current paper seeks to integrate social and cognitive psychological literature to provide a multifaceted understanding of attention to race. Social psychological studies show that participants demonstrate attentional bias to racial out‐group versus in‐group faces. Most of this research utilizes White participants and examines the attentional bias to Black faces, concluding that threat stereotypes or negative racial attitudes underlie attentional bias. However, visual processing research demonstrates that various stimulus‐ and perceiver‐driven processes impact attention, suggesting that mechanisms other than racial stereotypes may underlie race‐based attention. We propose a framework of attention that accounts not only for direct influences of the stimulus and perceiver but also perceiver‐stimulus interactions that emerge iteratively over time. We apply this framework to existing research on attention to race, elucidating various processes that can explain the attention to racial out‐groups. We propose that our framework can account for attention to race more generally, beyond the oft‐used Black versus White paradigm. We argue that mechanisms underlying attentional bias to race encompass complex factors beyond stereotypes and that our framework can account for stimulus, perceiver, and iterative processes that impact attention to race.
Change blindness is a phenomenon of visual perception that occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by its observer. Since it was first described in the 1990s, change blindness has provided a unique means to investigate the role of attention in visual processing. To date, the effect has been produced by changing images displayed on screen as well as changing people and objects in an individual’s environment. In this study, we combine these two approaches to directly compare the levels of change blindness produced in real-world and on-screen scenarios. We use a single series of museum artefacts and two groups of participants to simultaneously produce saccade-contingent change blindness in a real-world scenario, and camera pan-contingent change blindness in an on-screen scenario. We present the results in two parts. First, we find no significant difference between the mean levels of change blindness produced in on-screen and real-world scenarios by the same visual stimuli. Second, we identify a group of artefacts that were associated with a high level of change blindness in both scenarios and a group that were associated with a low level of change blindness in both scenarios. We suggest that the difference in change blindness levels results from bottom-up influences including the visible area and contrast of changes. We discuss the relation of these findings to our understanding of change detection as a part of visual processing, as well as the insights they offer to our understanding of the experience of viewing objects within a museum setting.
Although change detection constitutes an important and pervasive process in our everyday lives, phenomena such as change blindness show that we are quite limited in our ability to notice even large changes in visual scenes. Change detection is greatly dependant on attention deployment which can be influenced by the contextual setting in which a target item is presented. In this study we wanted to further address the influence of semantic relatedness of the changing item and the surrounding stimuli on the efficiency of change detection. The obtained results indicate that the contextual setting in which a changing element is presented influences the detection of changes. Change detection is generally more efficient in situations when changes are related to items incongruent with the surrounding context when compared to situations where an object belonging to the same category as surrounding items changes into another object from the same category.
"Dead zone" of attention is a spatial area adjoining the most interesting (central) object, where the likelihood to notice the looked for object or event is quite low. Two experimental studies aimed at the demonstration of the fact that "dead zone" is really connected to attention to central object are described. Both experiments were based on the phenomenon of blindness to change - stable inability to notice changes in perceived scene with short interruption of visual image until attention is focused on the changes. It is shown that increasing attention to central object by means of outer manipulations reinforces the stableness of blindness to change in assumed "dead zone": it shows that attention is the cause of "dead zone" origin. In the course of second experiment probabilistic characteristics of attention in the space were measured. The probability of change revealing in "dead zone" was 2,3 times less than in other peripheral areas. Two assumptions on mechanisms of "dead zone" origins are presented.
This paper deals with the representation of visual scenes. The paper proposes a review of recent works involving either change blindness paradigm or eye movements recordings having shown that visual representations of scenes rely on cognitive factors: semantic interest (i.e. what Visual information is useful to extract the meaning of the scene) and task-relevance (i.e. whether visual information is relevant to the task) of visual information. Moreover, this paper disentangles the two main issues about the degree of detail of representation stored in memory (high vs. poor). Finally, an alternative to the highly vs. poorly detailed representation issues is proposed. This issue states that scene perception relies on different levels of representation of scenes.
The results of quasi-experimental study of individual-psychological features' role in the intensity of blindness to change are presented. The photos of nature, urban scenery and animals were used as stimulus material. Some elements of the photos were changed. Cognitive styles as well as factors of temperament (extroversion and neurotism) were looked at as individual- psychological features. Complex tasks execution time was shorter in respondents with labile cognitive style as compared to rigid examinees. Emotionally stable respondents were quicker on complex tasks than others. Neurotic introverts and emotionally stable extraverts solved the tasks of medium difficulty quicker than emotionally stable introverts and neurotic extraverts.
The concept of selective attention is fundamental to understanding human behavior And in everyday life, it is clear that there are marked differences in attention among individuals Some have special talents and others face special challenges; individuals of different ages display predictably different capacities Some of these differences reflect a genetically determined plan governing neural growth, maturation, and senescence, whereas others reflect specific positive events such as the acquisition of expertise and negative events such as pathology or injury This chapter addresses three questions: What is attention? How does attention change during childhood? What are the consequences of these changes in daily life? These questions are examined primarily for the visual modality This chapter provides a new framework for understanding attention in children, young and older adults, and other populations of related interest, including athletes and accident-prone drivers Four modes of selection and their central features are described: reflex, habit, exploration, and deliberation Applied to the development of attention in childhood, this framework provides a way of understanding both age-related stability and age-related change. © 2006 by Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I.M. Craik. All rights reserved.
Jonides and Yantis (1988) found that abrupt-onset singletons capture attention in visual search when onset is orthogonal to the target's defining and reported attributes and that color and brightness singletons do not. They concluded that abrupt onset may be unique in capturing visual attention. Folk, Remington, and Johnston (1992) challenge this conclusion and argue that (a) the occurrence of attentional capture is contingent on the adoption of an appropriate attentional control setting by the observer and (b) properties other than onset (in particular, color) can capture attention involuntarily. In this article, each of these claims is critically evaluated, and it is argued that the results reported by Folk et al., thought important, do not definitively corroborate either one. The available evidence concerning stimulus-driven attentional capture is summarized, and 3 empirical generalizations that characterize the evidence are advanced.
Four experiments tested a new hypothesis that involuntary attention shifts are contingent on the relationship between the properties of the eliciting event and the properties required for task performance. In a variant of the spatial cuing paradigm, the relation between cue property and the property useful in locating the target was systematically manipulated. In Experiment 1, invalid abrupt-onset precues produced costs for targets characterized by an abrupt onset but not for targets characterized by a discontinuity in color. In Experiment 2, invalid color precues produced greater costs for color targets than for abrupt-onset targets. Experiment 3 provided converging evidence for this pattern. Experiment 4 investigated the boundary conditions and time course for attention shifts elicited by color discontinuities. The results of these experiments suggest that attention capture is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands.
Evidence from many different paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integration) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. In four experiments we use modified change blindness tasks to demonstrate (a) that sensitivity to change does occur in the absence of awareness, and (b) this sensitivity does not rely on the redeployment of attention. We discuss these results in relation to theories of scene perception, and propose a reinterpretation of the role of attention in representing change.
Presents a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. They have been standardized on 4 variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the 4 measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
The very limited capacity of short-term or working memory is one of the most prominent features of human cognition. Most studies have stressed delimiting the upper bounds of this memory in memorization tasks rather than the performance of everyday tasks. We designed a series of experiments to test the use of short-term memory in the course of a natural hand-eye task where subjects have the freedom to choose their own task parameters. In this case subjects choose not to operate at the maximum capacity of short-term memory but instead seek to minimize its use. In particular, reducing the instantaneous memory required to perform the task can be done by serializing the task with eye movements. These eye movements allow subjects to postpone the gathering of task-relevant information until just before it is required. The reluctance to use short-term memory can be explained if such memory is expensive to use with respect to the cost of the serializing strategy.
A set of visual search experiments tested the proposal that focused attention is needed to detect change. Displays were arrays of rectangles, with the target being the item that continually changed its orientation or contrast polarity. Five aspects of performance were examined: linearity of response, processing time, capacity, selectivity, and memory trace. Detection of change was found to be a self-termi-nating process requiring a time that increased linearly with the number of items in the display. Capacity for orientation was found to be about five items, a value comparable to estimates of attentional capacity. Observers were able to filter out both static and dynamic variations in irrelevant properties. Analysis also indi-cated a memory for previously attended locations. These results support the hypothesis that the process needed to detect change is much the same as the attentional process needed to detect complex static pat-terns. Interestingly, the features of orientation and polarity were found to be han-dled in somewhat different ways. Taken together, these results not only provide evidence that focused attention is needed to see change, but also show that change detection itself can provide new insights into the nature of attentional processing.
When looking at a scene, observers feel that they see its entire structure in great detail and can immediately notice any changes in it. However, when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced: identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly. Identification is much faster when a verbal cue is provided, showing that poor visibility is not the cause of this difficulty. Identification is also faster for objects mentioned in brief verbal descriptions of the scene. These results support the idea that observers never form a complete, detailed representation of their surroundings. In addition, results also indicate that attention is required to perceive change, and that in the absence of localized motion signals it is guided on the basis of high-level interest.
To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236170014_To_see_or_not_to_see_The_need_for_attention_to_perceive_changes_in_scenes [accessed Jun 15, 2017].
Three experiments investigated whether the semantic informativeness of a scene region (object) influences its representation between successive views. In Experiment 1, a scene and a modified version of that scene were presented in alternation, separated by a brief retention interval. A changed object was either semantically consistent with the scene (non-informative) or inconsistent (informative). Change detection latency was shorter in the semantically inconsistent versus consistent condition. In Experiment 2, eye movements were eliminated by presenting a single cycle of the change sequence. Detection accuracy was higher for inconsistent versus consistent objects. This inconsistent object advantage was obtained when the potential strategy of selectively encoding inconsistent objects was no longer advantageous (Experiment 3). These results indicate that the semantic properties of an object influence whether the representation of that object is maintained between views of a scene, and this influence is not caused solely by the differential allocation of eye fixations to the changing region. The potential cognitive mechanisms supporting this effect are discussed.
Observers inspected normal, high quality colour displays of everyday visual scenes while their eye movements were recorded. A large display change occurred each time an eye blink occurred. Display changes could either involve "Central Interest" or "Marginal Interest" locations, as determined from descrip-tions obtained from independent judges in a prior pilot experiment. Visual salience, as determined by luminance, colour, and position of the Central and Marginal Interest changes were equalized. The results obtained were very similar to those obtained in prior experiments showing failure to detect changes occurring simultaneously with saccades, flicker, or "mudsplashes" in the visual scene: Many changes were very hard to detect, and Marginal Interest changes were harder to detect than Central Interest changes. Analysis of eye movements showed, as expected, that the probability of detecting a change depended on the eye's distance from the change location. However a surprising finding was that both for Central and Marginal Interest changes, even when observers were directly fixating the change locations (within 1 degree), more than 40% of the time they still failed to see the changes. It seems that looking at something does not guarantee you " see" it.
Across saccades, blinks, blank screens, movie cuts, and other interruptions, ob-servers fail to detect substantial changes to the visual details of objects and scenes. This inability to spot changes ("change blindness") is the focus of this special issue of Visual Cognition. This introductory paper briefly reviews recent studies of change blindness, noting the relation of these findings to earlier re-search and discussing the inferences we can draw from them. Most explanations of change blindness assume that we fail to detect changes because the changed display masks or overwrites the initial display. Here I draw a distinction between intentional and incidental change detection tasks and consider how alternatives to the "overwriting" explanation may provide better explanations for change blindness. Imagine you are watching a movie in which an actor is sitting in a cafeteria with a jacket slung over his shoulder. The camera then cuts to a close-up and his jacket is now over the back of his chair. You might think that everyone would notice this obvious editing mistake. Yet, recent research on visual memory has found that people are surprisingly poor at noticing large changes to objects, photographs, and motion pictures from one instant to the next (see Simons & Levin, 1997 for a review). Although researchers have long noted the existence of such "change blindness" (e.g. Bridgeman, Hendry, & Stark, 1975; French, 1953; Friedman, 1979; Hochberg, 1986; Kuleshov, 1987; McConkie & Zola, 1979; Pashler, 1988; Phillips, 1974), recent demonstrations by John Grimes and others have led to a renewed interest in the problem of change detection. The new theoretical ideas and paradigms resulting from this resurgence in the study of visual memory are the focus of this special issue.
Three visual-search experiments tested whether the preattentive parallel stage can-selectively guide the attentive stage to
a particular known-to-be-relevant target feature. Subjects searched multielement displays for a salient green circle that
had a unique form when surrounded by green nontarget squares or had a unique color when surrounded by red nontarget circles.
In the distractor conditions, a salient item in the other dimension was present as well. As an extension of earlier findings
(Theeuwes, 1991), the results showed that complete top-down selectivity toward a particular feature was not possible, not
even after extended and consistent practice. The results reveal that selectivity depends on the relative discriminability
of the stimulus dimensions: the presence of an irrelevant item with a unique color interferes with parallel search for a unique
form, and vice versa.
Two experiments were carried out to investigate the relation between exogenous and endogenous control of visual attention.
Subjects searched for a target letter among three nontarget letters that were positioned on an imaginary circle around a fixation
point. At different cue-display intervals, a centrally located arrowhead cue reliably indicated the location of the target
letter. At different SOAs, a peripheral line segment near one of the letters was either abruptly switched on (Experiment 1)
or abruptly switched off (Experiment2). Presenting the central arrowhead after display onset prevents attention from being
focused in advance on the critical location. In this unfocused attentional state, both onset and offset transients attracted
attention. When the central arrowhead was available in advance, the focusing of attention prior to display onset precluded
attention attraction to the location of the onset or offset transient. Contrary to an offset transient, an onset transient
presented at the attended location disrupted performance, indicating that an onset within the spotlight of attention attracts
attention. The results are reconciled by means of the zoom-lens theory of attention, suggesting that outside the focus of
attention, abrupt transients are not capable of attracting attention. Since the size of the zoom lens is under voluntary control,
it can be argued that transients do not fulfill the intentionality criterion of automaticity. mt]This study was supported
in part by the Institute for Road Safety Research SWOV.
Our intuition that we richly represent the visual details of our environment is illusory. When viewing a scene, we seem to
use detailed representations of object properties and interobject relations to achieve a sense of continuity across views.
Yet, several recent studies show that human observers fail to detect changes to objects and object properties when localized
retinal information signaling a change is masked or eliminated (e.g., by eye movements). However, these studies changed arbitrarily
chosen objects which may have been outside the focus of attention. We draw on previous research showing the importance of
spatiotemporal information for tracking objects by creating short motion pictures in which objects in both arbitrary locations
and the very center of attention were changed. Adult observers failed to notice changes in both cases, even when the sole
actor in a scene transformed into another person across an instantaneous change in camera angle (or “cut”).
Recent research on change detection has documented surprising failures to detect visual changes occurring between views of
a scene, suggesting the possibility that visual representations contain few details. Although these studies convincingly demonstrate
change blindness for objects in still images and motion pictures, they may not adequately assess the capacity to represent
objects in the real world. Here we examine and reject the possibility that change blindness in previous studies resulted from
passive viewing of 2-D displays. In one experiment, an experimenter initiated a conversation with a pedestrian, and during
the interaction, he was surreptitiously replaced by a different experimenter. Only half of the pedestrians detected the change.
Furthermore, successful detection depended on social group membership; pedestrians from the same social group as the experimenters
detected the change but those from a different social group did not. A second experiment further examined the importance of
this effect of social group. Provided that the meaning of the scene is unchanged, changes to attended objects can escape detection
even when they occur during a natural, real-world interaction. The discussion provides a set of guidelines and suggestions
for future research on change blindness.
A pattern made by randomly filling cells in a square matrix was presented for 1 see and followed, after various intervals,
by an identical or similar pattern. Ss responded “same” or “different.” Performance was fast and accurate if the interval
was short and there was no movement or masking of the pattern during the interval. Performance was slower, less accurate,
and highly dependent on pattern complexity if the interval exceeded 100 msec or if there was movement or masking. The results
are interpreted as evidence for two distinct classes of visual memory: high-capacity sensory storage which is tied to spatial
position and is maskable and brief; and schematic short-term visual memory which is not tied to spatial position, which is
protected against masking, and which becomes less effective over the first few seconds but not over the first 600 msec.
College students read a passage presented in AlTeRnAtInG cAsE on a CRT while their eye movements were monitored. During certain
saccades, the case of every letter was changed (a became A, B became b). This change was not perceived and had no effect on
eye movements. Apparently visual features of the type which specify the difference between upper- and lowercase letters are
not integrated across fixations during reading.
One of the more powerful impressions created by vision is that of a coherent, richly-detailed world where everything is present simultaneously. Indeed, this impression is so compelling that we tend to ascribe these properties not only to the external world, but to our internal representations as well. But results from several recent experiments argue against this latter ascription. For example, changes in images of real-world scenes often go unnoticed when made during a saccade, flicker, blink, or movie cut. This "change blindness" provides strong evidence against the idea that our brains contain a picture-like representation of the scene that is everywhere detailed and coherent.
How then do we represent a scene? It is argued here that focused attention provides spatiotemporal coherence for the stable representation of one object at a time. It is then argued that the allocation of attention can be coordinated to create a "virtual representation". In such a scheme, a stable object representation is formed whenever needed, making it appear to higher levels as if all objects in the scene are represented in detail simultaneously.
As people examine their world, the proximal stimulus changes position on their retinae with every saccade, but they perceive the world as being stable. This phenomenon of visual stability was explored by making changes in natural, full-color pictures during selected saccades as observers examined them in preparation for a recognition test. In Experiment 1, the pictures were displaced up, down, left, or right by 0.3, 0.6, or 1.2°. In Experiment 2, the pictures were expanded or contracted by 10% or 20%. As a secondary task, subjects pressed a button when a change was detected. Three results from previous studies with simpler stimuli did not generalize. Evidence suggests that subjects' detection of image changes primarily involves the use of local information in the region of the eyes' landing position. A saccade target theory of visual stability is proposed.
Discusses general properties of frame theories and their implications for psychological processes. An experiment that determined whether this approach yields predictions about how people comprehend and remember pictures of real-world scenes is presented. Normative ratings were used to construct 6 target pictures containing both expected and unexpected objects. Eye movements were then recorded as college student Ss who anticipated a difficult recognition test viewed the targets for 30 sec each. Ss were asked to discriminate the target pictures from distractors in which either expected or unexpected objects had been changed. Results show that first fixations to the unexpected objects were approximately twice as long as first fixations to the expected objects. On the recognition test, Ss generally noticed only the changes that had been made to the unexpected objects, despite the fact that the proportions of correct rejections were made conditional on whether the target objects had been fixated. These data are consistent with the idea that local visual details of objects represented in the frame are not necessary for identification and are thus not generally encoded. It is concluded that if 2 events instantiate the same frame, they may often be indistinguishable if any differences between them are represented as arguments in the frame. (31/4 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Four experiments tested a new hypothesis that involuntary attention shifts are contingent on the relationship between the properties of the eliciting event and the properties required for task performance. In a variant of the spatial cuing paradigm, the relation between cue property and the property useful in locating the target was systematically manipulated. In Experiment 1, invalid abrupt-onset precues produced costs for targets characterized by an abrupt onset but not for targets characterized by a discontinuity in color. In Experiment 2, invalid color precues produced greater costs for color targets than for abrupt-onset targets. Experiment 3 provided converging evidence for this pattern. Experiment 4 investigated the boundary conditions and time course for attention shifts elicited by color discontinuities. The results of these experiments suggest that attention capture is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands.
Three visual-search experiments tested whether the preattentive parallel stage can selectively guide the attentive stage to a particular known-to-be-relevant target feature. Subjects searched multielement displays for a salient green circle that had a unique form when surrounded by green nontarget squares or had a unique color when surrounded by red nontarget circles. In the distractor conditions, a salient item in the other dimension was present as well. As an extension of earlier findings (Theeuwes, 1991), the results showed that complete top-down selectivity toward a particular feature was not possible, not even after extended and consistent practice. The results reveal that selectivity depends on the relative discriminability of the stimulus dimensions: the presence of an irrelevant item with a unique color interferes with parallel search for a unique form, and vice versa.
Three visual search experiments tested whether top-down selectivity toward particular stimulus dimensions is possible during preattentive parallel search. Subjects viewed multielement displays in which two salient items, each unique in a different dimension--that is, color and intensity (Experiment 1) or color and form (Experiments 2 and 3)--were simultaneously present. One of the dimensions defined the target; the other dimension served as distractor. The results indicate that when search is performed in parallel, top-down selectivity is not possible. These findings suggest that preattentive parallel search is strongly automatic, because it satisfies both the load-insensitivity and the unintentionality criteria of automaticity.
The hypothesis that abrupt visual onsets capture attention automatically, as suggested by Yantis and Jonides (1984) was tested in four experiments. A centrally located cue directed attention to one of several stimulus positions in preparation for the identification of a target letter embedded in an array of distractor letters. In all experiments, one stimulus (either the target or one of the distractors) had an abrupt onset; the remaining letters did not. The effectiveness of the cue was manipulated (varying either its duration or its predictive validity) to test whether abrupt onsets capture attention even when subjects are in a highly focused attentional state. Results showed that onsets do not necessarily capture attention in violation of an observer's intentions. A mechanism for partially automatic attentional capture by abrupt onset is proposed, and the diagnosticity of the intentionality criterion for automaticity is discussed.
The effect of temporal discontinuity on visual search was assessed by presenting a display in which one item had an abrupt onset, while other items were introduced by gradually removing line segments that camouflaged them. We hypothesized that an abrupt onset in a visual display would capture visual attention, giving this item a processing advantage over items lacking an abrupt leading edge. This prediction was confirmed in Experiment 1. We designed a second experiment to ensure that this finding was due to attentional factors rather than to sensory or perceptual ones. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1 and demonstrated that the procedure used to avoid abrupt onset--camouflage removal--did not require a gradual waveform. Implications of these findings for theories of attention are discussed.
Previous research has shown that a task-irrelevant sudden onset of an object will capture an observer's visual attention or draw it to that object (e.g., Yantis & Jonides, 1984). However, further research has demonstrated the apparent inability of an object with a task-irrelevant but unique color or luminance to capture attention (Jonides & Yantis, 1988). In the experiments reported here, we reexplore the question of whether task-irrelevant properties other than sudden onset may capture attention. Our results suggest that uniquely colored or luminous objects, as well as salient though irrelevant boundaries, do not appear to capture attention. However, these irrelevant features do appear to serve as landmarks for a top-down search strategy which becomes increasingly likely with larger display set sizes. These findings are described in terms of stimulus-driven and goal-directed aspects of attentional control.
Theeuwes (1992) found a distracting effect of irrelevant-dimension singletons in a task involving search for a known target. He argued from this that selectivity is determined solely by stimulus salience; the parallel stage of visual processing cannot provide top-down guidance to the attentive stage sufficient to permit completely selective use of task-relevant information. We argue that in the task used by Theeuwes, subjects may have adopted the strategy of searching for an odd form even though the specific target form was known. In Experiment 1, we replicated Theeuwes's findings. Search for a circle target among diamond nontargets was disrupted by the presence of a diamond nontarget that was uniquely colored. In two subsequent experiments, we discouraged the singleton detection strategy, forcing subjects to search for the target feature. There was no distracting effect of a color singleton in these experiments, even with displays physically identical to those of Experiment 1, demonstrating that top-down selectivity is indeed possible during visual search. We conclude that goal-directed selection of a specific known featural identity may override stimulus-driven capture by salient featural singletons.
Previous work has shown that abrupt visual onsets capture attention. This occurs even with stimuli that are equiluminant with the background, which suggests that the appearance of a new perceptual object, not merely a change in luminance, captures attention. Three experiments are reported in which this work was extended by investigating the possible role of visual motion in attentional capture. Experiment 1 revealed that motion can efficiently guide attention when it is perfectly informative about the location of a visual search target, but that it does not draw attention when it does not predict the target's position. This result was obtained with several forms of motion, including oscillation, looming, and nearby moving contours. To account for these and other results, we tested a new-object account of attentional capture in Experiment 2 by using a global/local paradigm. When motion segregated a local letter from its perceptual group, the local letter captured attention as indexed by an effect on latency of response to the task-relevant global configuration. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that the motion in Experiment 2 captured attention merely by increasing the salience of the moving object. We argue instead that when motion segregates a perceptual element from a perceptual group, a new perceptual object is created, and this event captures attention. Together, the results suggest that motion as such does not capture attention but that the appearance of a new perceptual object does.
Jonides and Yantis (1988) found that abrupt-onset singletons capture attention in visual search when onset is orthogonal to the target's defining and reported attributes and that color and brightness singletons do not. They concluded that abrupt onset may be unique in capturing visual attention. Folk, Remington, and Johnston (1992) challenge this conclusion and argue that (a) the occurrence of attentional capture is contingent on the adoption of an appropriate attentional control setting by the observer and (b) properties other than onset (in particular, color) can capture attention involuntarily. In this article, each of these claims is critically evaluated, and it is argued that the results reported by Folk et al., though important, do not definitively corroborate either one. The available evidence concerning stimulus-driven attentional capture is summarized, and 3 empirical generalizations that characterize the evidence are advanced.
Our construction of a stable visual world, despite the presence of saccades, is discussed. A computer-graphics method was used to explore transsaccadic memory for complex images. Images of real-life scenes were presented under four conditions: they stayed still or moved in an unpredictable direction (forcing an eye movement), while simultaneously changing or staying the same. Changes were the appearance, disappearance, or rotation of an object in the scene. Subjects detected the changes easily when the image did not move but when it moved their performance fell to chance. A grey-out period was introduced to mimic that which occurs during a saccade. This also reduced performance but not to chance levels.
These results reveal the poverty of transsaccadic memory for real-life complex scenes. They are discussed with respect to Dennett's view that much less information is available in vision than our subjective impression leads us to believe. Our stable visual world may be constructed out of a brief retinal image and a very sketchy, higher-level representation along with a pop-out mechanism to redirect attention. The richness of our visual world is, to this extent, an illusion.
Paying attention is something we are all familiar with and often take for granted, yet the nature of the operations involved in paying attention is one of the most profound mysteries of the brain. This book contains a rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles by some of the pioneers of contemporary research on attention. Central themes include how attention is moved within the visual field; attention’ s role during visual search, and the inhibition of these search processes; how attentional processing changes as continued practice leads to automatic performance; how visual and auditory attentional processing may be linked; and recent advances in functional neuro-imaging and how they have been used to study the brain’ s attentional network
What is the nature of the information that is preserved and combined across saccadic eye movements during the visual analysis of real-world objects? The two experiments reported investigated transsaccadic memory and transsaccadic integration, respectively In the critical condition, participants were presented with one set of contours from an object during one fixation and with a complementary set of contours during the next fixation In Experiment 1, participants could at best inconsistently detect contour changes across the saccade In Experiment 2, a change in visible contour had no influence on object identification These results suggest that a veridical representation of object contour is neither consistently preserved nor integrated across a saccade
Models of human visual memory often presuppose an extraordinary ability to recognize and identify objects, based on evidence for nearly flawless recognition of hundreds or even thousands of pictures after a single presentation (Nickerson, 1965, Shepard, 1967, Standing, Conezio, & Haber, 1970) and for storage of tens of thousands of object representations over the course of a lifetime (Biederman, 1987) However, recent evidence suggests that observers often fail to notice dramatic changes to scenes, especially changes occurring during eye movements (e g, Grimes, 1996) The experiments presented here show that immediate memory for object identity is surprisingly poor, especially when verbal labeling is prevented However, memory for the spatial configuration of objects remains excellent even with verbal interference suggesting a fundamental difference between representations of spatial configuration and object properties
This book provides a foundation to the principles of psychology. It draws upon the natural sciences, avoiding metaphysics, for the basis of its information. According to James, this book, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychology, when it has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain, can go no farther as a natural science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
how can large-scale alterations . . . be made to scenes without the viewer's awareness / what does the critical nature of the timing of the image manipulation reveal about the visual system / what implications does this odd phenomenon have for theories of vision and visual perception / consider some of the subevents that occur when a person views a scene / there are several discrete levels of analysis that are useful to consider when a person views a picture, and factors at each of those levels have a direct influence on the person's overall perception / [the author believes] that the phenomenon occurs due to an interaction between different levels of the visual systems / suspect that it is the combination of certain properties present at different levels of the visual system that interact in a way that opens a hole . . . in the perception of the visual world, and it is through this hole that image changes . . . fall (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Yantis and Jonides (1984) demonstrated that the detection of a target in visual search was markedly enhanced when the target
was presented as an abruptly onset character embedded among other characters whose presentation was not characterized by abrupt
onset. This effect was attributed to a shift of attention caused by abrupt onset. In the present article, we report experiments
investigating whether abrupt onset is simply one member of a large class of stimulus characteristics, all of which are capable
of capturing attention. To test this possibility, we compared abrupt onset with differences in stimulus luminance and hue
to determine whether these also could elicit shifts of attention. They could not.
revision accepted for publication October 2, 1987. How do different dimensions (e.g., color and form) interact when the visual
system locates boundaries in surfaces? Seven experiments are reported in which subjects located a target “singleton” element
that was unique in a given dimension. Minimal interference occurred when another dimension, known to be irrelevant, was varied
randomly, even if the specific identity of the target feature was unknown (Experiments 1–4). These results argue against the
hypothesis of a single difference-detection process that operates on multidimensional representations. However, performance
was also little affected by whether the subjects knew in advance which dimension contained the singleton (Experiment 5), so
an attentional set to suppress the irrelevant dimension was not implicated. On the other hand, singletons in the (prespecified)
irrelevant dimension did produce major interference when the target was unspecified (Experiments 6 and 7), which indicates
that texture boundaries of similar types cannot be accessed completely independently for separable dimensions. Together, the
results suggest that boundaries may be registered by detectors that respond to specific types and locations of boundaries
specified by variation within a particular dimension; selection by boundary type is effective, but selection or suppression
by dimension is relatively ineffective. Parallels with some recent neurophysiological findings are noted.
Detection of change when one display of familiar objects replaces another display might be based purely upon visual codes,
or also on identity information (i.e., knowingwhat was presentwhere in the initial display). Displays of 10 alphanumeric characters were presented and, after a brief offset, were presented
again in the same position, with or without a change in a single character. Subjects’ accuracy in change detection did not
suggest preservation of any more information than is usually available in whole report, except with the briefest of offsets
(under 50 msec). Stimulus duration had only modest effects. The interaction of masking with offset duration followed the pattern
previously observed with unfamiliar visual stimuli (Phillips, 1974). Accuracy was not reduced by reflection of the characters
about a horizontal axis, suggesting that categorical information contributed negligibly. Detection of change appears to depend
upon capacity-limited visual memory; (putative) knowledge of what identities are present in different display locations does
not seem to contribute.
To determine whether apoptosis is involved in retinal degeneration induced by intravitreal implantation of 5 iron particles in rat eyes.
Autoclaved iron particles were implanted in the vitreous cavities of the experimental eyes. Glass chips were implanted in the control eyes. The experimental eyes were enucleated at various time intervals from days 1 to 15. Retinal degeneration was examined using the TdT-mediated, dUTP-biotin nick-end labeling (TUNEL) method. Electrophoresis on agarose gel was used to detect internucleosomal DNA fragmentation.
TUNEL-positive nuclei were observed only in the outer nuclear layer beginning on day 2. The nuclei spread throughout the outer nuclear layer by the end of day 3. No TUNEL-positive nuclei were observed in other layers throughout the experimental period. Analysis of DNA, extracted from the retinas by electrophoresis on agarose gel, revealed a typical ladder pattern of internucleosomal DNA cleavage in the experimental eyes.
Apoptosis occurred during photoreceptor cell death at the early phase of iron-induced retinopathy in these rats. Like photic injury, iron-induced apoptosis was limited to the outer nuclear layer.
Although at any instant we experience a rich, detailed visual world, we do not use such visual details to form a stable representation across views. Over the past five years, researchers have focused increasingly on 'change blindness' (the inability to detect changes to an object or scene) as a means to examine the nature of our representations. Experiments using a diverse range of methods and displays have produced strikingly similar results: unless a change to a visual scene produces a localizable change or transient at a specific position on the retina, generally, people will not detect it. We review theory and research motivating work on change blindness and discuss recent evidence that people are blind to changes occurring in photographs, in motion pictures and even in real-world interactions. These findings suggest that relatively little visual information is preserved from one view to the next, and question a fundamental assumption that has underlain perception research for centuries: namely, that we need to store a detailed visual representation in the mind/brain from one view to the next.
Perception of the rapid displacement of a target is suppressed during saccadic eye movements. Suppression is complete if eye movement is more than about three times larger than target displacement, and some suppression occurs even for target displacements of 4°. These results can be interpreted with the addition of a threshold element to the algebraic sum of the corollary discharge and the visual signal.
Among the most fundamental issues of visual attention research is the extent to which visual selection is controlled by properties of the stimulus or by the intentions, goals, and beliefs of the observer. Before selective attention operates, preattentive processes perform some basic analyses segmenting the visual field into functional perceptual units. The crucial question is whether the allocation of attention to these perceptual units is under the endogenous control of the observer (intentions, goals, beliefs) or under the exogenous control of attention in tasks in which subjects search for a particular 'basic' feature (eg search for a unique colour, shape, or brightness). In the present review it is suggested that selectivity in these types of search tasks is dependent on the relative saliency of the stimulus attributes. It is concluded that the visual system automatically calculates differences in basic features (eg difference in shape, colour, or brightness) and that visual information occupying the position of the highest saliency across stimulus dimensions is exogenously passed on to the 'central presentation' that is responsible for further stimulus analysis. Alternative explanations of the present findings and tentative speculations resulting from the present approach are discussed.
As people examine their world, the proximal stimulus changes position on their retinae with every saccade, but they perceive the world as being stable. This phenomenon of visual stability was explored by making changes in natural, full-color pictures during selected saccades as observers examined them in preparation for a recognition test. In Experiment 1, the pictures were displaced up, down, left, or right by 0.3, 0.4, or 1.2 degrees. In Experiment 2, the pictures were expanded or contracted by 10% or 20%. As a secondary task, subjects pressed a button when a change was detected. Three results from previous studies with simpler stimuli did not generalize. Evidence suggests that subjects' detection of image changes primarily involves the use of local information in the region of the eyes' landing position. A saccade target theory of visual stability is proposed.