Preserved Representation of Changed Objects

这个项目调查了人们在看世界时所构建的物体和场景的视觉表现。尽管有意识的经验表明，我们会对所看到的东西形成一种详细的表征，但最近的一项研究发现，观察者往往无法察觉到从一个视角到另一个视角的场景的大变化（变化盲视），这一发现被解释为我们不能详细表征我们的视觉环境的证据。这个项目检验了另一种假设：尽管观察者不能有意识地察觉到复杂场景的视觉细节的变化，但这些细节仍然被呈现出来。实验通过检测变化检测失败时视觉表征的本质来验证这一假设。研究中采用了两个程序创新。首先，刺激将是动态图像而不是静态场景，以便在更接近观察者真实世界经验的背景下评估场景表现。第二，在变化检测过程中监测眼球运动。眼球运动应该提供一种更敏感的场景表征方法，并将允许注意力在场景表征信息中的作用得到检验。这些方法将用于调查变更检测的失败是否意味着缺乏表示，或者仅仅是表示无法被意识到。研究结果将有助于我们理解视觉环境是如何从一个视角呈现到另一个视角的，以及这些呈现如何有助于我们对稳定的视觉世界的感知和意识。

This project investigates the visual representations of objects and scenes people construct as they view the world. Although conscious experience suggests that we form a detailed representation of what we are looking at, recent findings that observers often fail to detect large changes to scenes from one view to the next (change blindness) have been interpreted as evidence we don't represent our visual surroundings in much detail. This project examines an alternative hypothesis: Although observers cannot consciously detect changes to the visual details of complex scenes, these details are nevertheless represented. The experiments test this hypothesis by examining the nature of visual representations when change detection fails. Two procedural innovations are used in the studies. First, stimuli will be motion pictures rather than static scenes, to allow assessment of scene representation in a context closer to the real-world experiences of observers. Second, eye movements will be monitored during change detection. Eye movements should provide a more sensitive measure of scene representation, and will allow the role of attention in formation of scene representations to be examined. These methods will be used to investigate whether failures of change detection imply the lack of a representation or simply the inaccessibility of a representation to awareness. The results should add to our understanding of how the visual environment is represented from one view to the next, and how the representations contribute to our perception and awareness of a stable visual world.