Large capacity storage of integrated objects before change blindness

Abstract

Normal people have a strikingly low ability to detect changes in a visual scene. This has been taken as evidence that the brain represents only a few objects at a time, namely those currently in the focus of attention. In the present study, subjects were asked to detect changes in the orientation of rectangular figures in a textured display across a 1600 ms gray interval. In the first experiment, change detection improved when the location of a possible change was cued during the interval. The cue remained effective during the entire interval, but after the interval, it was ineffective, suggesting that an initially large representation was overwritten by the post-change display. To control for an effect of light intensity during the interval on the decay of the representation, we compared performance with a gray or a white interval screen in a second experiment. We found no difference between these conditions. In the third experiment, attention was occasionally misdirected during the interval by first cueing the wrong figure, before cueing the correct figure. This did not compromise performance compared to a single cue, indicating that when an item is attentionally selected, the representation of yet unchosen items remains available. In the fourth experiment, the cue was shown to be effective when changes in figure size and orientation were randomly mixed. At the time the cue appeared, subjects could not know whether size or orientation would change, therefore these results suggest that the representation contains features in their 'bound' state. Together, these findings indicate that change blindness involves overwriting of a large capacity representation by the post-change display.

Setting and changing feature priorities in visual short-term memory

“…Whereas spatial retro-cues are known to strongly affect the content of visual memory (Astle et al, 2012;Griffin & Nobre, 2003;Landman et al, 2003;Makovski, Sussman, & Jiang, 2008;Murray, Nobre, Clark, Cravo, & Stokes, 2013;Rerko & Oberauer, 2013;Rerko, Souza, & Oberauer, 2014;Sligte et al, 2008), few studies have addressed the role of FBA during VSTM maintenance. In these studies, colored retrocues identified one of several colored objects held in memory and participants reproduced their orientation (Heuer & Schubö, 2016;Li & Saiki, 2015;Pertzov et al, 2013).…”

“…A cue to a location, for instance, presented shortly after the offset of a visual array, retains memory of stimuli that had occupied the cued location (Sperling, 1960). Indeed, spatial retro-cues can generate behavioral results equivalent to those of pre-cues (Griffin & Nobre, 2003;Landman, Spekreijse, & Lamme, 2003), even when presented seconds after the disappearance of the stimulus array (e.g., Astle, Summerfield, Griffin, & Nobre, 2012;Sligte, Scholte, & Lamme, 2008).…”

Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access

“…Three forms of visual short-term memory A number of laboratories have shown that cues presented up to 12 seconds after an array has disappeared can enhance memory for the array [4,39,[55][56][57]. This technique has been exploited most impressively by a group at the University of Amsterdam that has amassed evidence for a third form of memory, 'fragile visual short-term memory' (fragile VSTM) [8,9,36,37,60], in addition to iconic and working memory (see Figure 4a for a depiction of the basic experimental procedure employed by this group).…”

“…Importantly for the argument I will make below, Landman et al [56] showed that subjects could make reports based on whether an item changed in either size or orientation, as well as size and orientation separately, which…”

When Is Perception Conscious?

“…In sum, the research by Li et al (2002) does not provide strong evidence for consciousness without attention Turn now to another study purporting to show that there can be consciousness without attention. Landman et al (2003) devised a clever experiment that combines change blindness with Sperling's array paradigm. Subjects see an array of rectangles, which are either horizontal or vertical, followed by a gray screen, and then a second array.…”