Metacognitive judgements of change detection predict change blindness

Abstract

People tend to think they are not susceptible to change blindness and overestimate their ability to detect salient changes in scenes. Here, we investigated whether participants’ metacognitive judgements of change detection ability predict change blindness. In Experiment 1, participants completed a change blindness task in which participants viewed alternating versions of a scene until they detected what changed between them and 6-7 months later, provided their metacognitive judgements. We found that changes rated as more likely to be spotted were detected faster than changes rated as more unlikely to be spotted. Metacognitive judgements continued to predict change blindness when accounting for low-level image properties (i.e., change size and eccentricity). In Experiment 2, metacognitive judgements from a new group of participants were compared to those collected in Experiment 1 to determine whether people are better predicting their own change blindness or if the predictions from others are equally effective. There was no effect of participant group on the relationship between metacognitive judgements and change blindness. Finally, in Experiment 3, we investigated whether metacognitive judgements are based on a high-level image property – semantic similarity. An independent group of participants provided descriptions of the two versions of the scenes and another group rated the similarity between the descriptions. We found that changes rated as more similar were judged as being more difficult to detect than changes rated as less similar; however, semantic similarity was not predictive of change blindness. These findings reveal that (1) people can accurately rate the relative difficulty of different changes and predict change blindness for different images and (2) metacognitive judgements of change detection likelihood are not fully explained by low-level and semantic image properties.