Change Blindness: Representing Information Across Views

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People often do not notice large changes to displays ranging from simple arrays of novel objects to complex, naturalistic motion pictures. For example, observers sometimes fail to notice when the central actor in a motion picture is replaced by a different person during a cut to a different camera view. Yet, the mechanisms underlying such change detection failures, or "change blindness," are not well understood. The primary goal of this proposal is to investigate the way in which our representations of the visual world influence our ability (or inability) to detect changes when viewers intentionally search for a change and when they do not anticipate a change. Experimental tasks will be used both in and out of the laboratory thereby including conditions in which the representation of visual scenes is tested under more ecologically valid viewing conditions. Variables will include the magnitude of the change, the initial viewing time, the delay between the original and changed display, and the complexity of the scene. Another series of experiments will use both intentional and incidental tasks to explore the detection of categorical changes to in simple arrays of objects, photographs of natural scenes, and motion pictures. A third series of experiments explores the possibility that we may form implicit or even explicit traces of changed objects even when we are unaware of the change itself. These experiments investigate whether failures of change detection imply the lack of a representation or simply the inaccessibility of a representation to awareness. Previous work on change blindness has assumed that the failure to detect a change implies the absence of a representation. This inference has led to the conclusion that people retain little information about their visual world from one view to the next. The studies in this proposal will explore the possibility that we represent more of our visual world than the existence of change blindness might imply. By using both intentional and incidental tasks with displays ranging from simple arrays of objects to complex, dynamic scenes, these experiments will allow a more complete description of the nature of our visual representations from one view to the next and of visual short-term memory in general.