Individual differences in change blindness are predicted by the strength and stability of visual representations

Abstract

The phenomenon of change blindness reveals that people are surprisingly poor at detecting unexpected visual changes; however, research on individual differences in detection ability is scarce. Predictive processing accounts of visual perception suggest that better change detection may be linked to assigning greater weight to prediction error signals, as indexed by an increased alternation rate in perceptual rivalry or greater sensitivity to low-level visual signals. Alternatively, superior detection ability may be associated with robust visual predictions against which sensory changes can be more effectively registered, suggesting an association with high-level mechanisms of visual short-term memory (VSTM) and attention. We administered a battery of 10 measures to explore these predictions and to determine, for the first time, the test–retest reliability of commonly used change detection measures. Change detection performance was stable over time and generalized from displays of static scenes to video clips. An exploratory factor analysis revealed two factors explaining performance across the battery, that we identify as visual stability (loading on change detection, attention measures, VSTM and perceptual rivalry) and visual ability (loading on iconic memory, temporal order judgments and contrast sensitivity). These results highlight the importance of strong, stable representations and the ability to resist distraction, in order to successfully incorporate unexpected changes into the contents of visual awareness.

Individual differences in the tendency to see the expected

“…The relationship between change detection and visual imagery could be explained by common dependence on a third variable, namely, VSTM, as accessing vivid internal representations may be conditional on storing high quality representations in the first place. Encoding and maintenance of scenes into VSTM is thought to be one of the key mechanisms causally involved in change detection (Tseng et al, 2010), and in our own work we showed that VSTM accuracy predicts improved change detection in naturalistic scenes (Andermane et al, 2019). Performance on VWM tasks also correlates with visual imagery strength (Keogh & Pearson, 2011) and both rely on representations encoded in the visual cortex (Pearson, Naselaris, Holmes, & Kosslyn, 2015;Albers, Kok, Toni, Dijkerman, & De Lange, 2013;Slotnick, Thompson, Kosslyn, 2005;Kosslyn et al, 1999).…”

“…In the CB task, the cumulative percentage of correctly identified changes was calculated at each time point (e.g., percentage correct with RTs of below 1 s, 2 s, 3 s ... 30 s) (this analysis is described in Andermane et al, 2019). An inverse exponential function (i.e., Y = e  / X , where Y is the cumulative percentage correct, X is the time in seconds, is the asymptote and relates to steepness/curvature) was then fit to this data, generating parameters  and  for each participant in each session.…”

Neurally-constrained modeling of human gaze strategies in a change blindness task

“…We speculate that model parameters such as the length of fixation durations (µ FD ) and variability of saccade amplitudes (T, σ SA ) may correspond to the "visual stability" factor. In contrast, other parameters, such as the temporal decay factor (γ) and spatial decay scale (β) may correspond to visual memory and attentional breadth variables, respectively; these latter variables may also constitute components of the "visual ability" factor identified by (Andermane et al 2019). Finally, the firing rate prior (µ f ) may reflect familiarity with the context of the visual stimulus.…”

“…could have been influenced by several factors, including their level of motivation and alertness during the experimental session. Nevertheless, of particular interest, is a recent study on change(Andermane et al 2019) that evaluated test-retest reliability in change blindness tasks. This study found that observers' change detection performance generalized over several standard tasks, and was relative stable over periods of 1-4 weeks.…”

A Three-Feature Model to Predict Colour Change Blindness

“…Change blindness depends on individual factors such as observer experience [35], age [36] and culture [37]. A recent study [38] revealed that detection performance is associated with the ability to form stable perceptual inferences and with being able to resist task-irrelevant distractors. A battery of tests were used to characterise the idiosyncrasy of change blindness in terms of cognitive and attentional capacities.…”