On the Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes Across Brief Interruptions

Abstract

When brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced: The changes become extremely difficult to notice, even when they are large, presented repeatedly, and the observer expects them to occur (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). To determine the mechanisms behind this induced "change blindness", four experiments examine its dependence on initial preview and on the nature of the interruptions used. Results support the proposal that representations at the early stages of visual processing are inherently volatile, and that focused attention is needed to stabilize them sufficiently to support the perception of change.Over the past few decades, evidence has been accumulating that-contrary to our subjective impressions-we do not have a coherent and detailed representation of the coherent and detailed world that surrounds us. For example,

The elephant in the room: Inconsistency in scene viewing and representation.

“…First, they indicate that previous controversial evidence about an inconsistency advantage for selection prioritisation during viewing (e.g., Bonitz & Gordon, 2008;Brockmole & Henderson, 2008;Cornelissen & Võ, 2017;Hollingworth & Henderson, 2003;Loftus & Mackworth, 1978;Stirk & Underwood, 2007;Underwood et al, 2007Underwood et al, , 2008 may have arisen from a bias in informativeness per se, due to comparisons with poorly informative objects. Second, they corroborate previous research, carried out in the change detection domain, which considered consistent/diagnostic and consistent/low informative objects and showed that informativeness in terms of diagnosticity for scene leads to preferential selection Pringle et al, 2001;Rensink et al, 1997Rensink et al, , 2000Spotorno & Faure, 2011). We reinforce this earlier claim by demonstrating that diagnosticity prioritisation holds true even when removing the imbalance in informativeness between the compared objects.…”

Volatile visual representations: Failing to detect changes in recently processed information

“…However, the evidence for this claim is indirect and less than compelling. Rensink et al (2000) found that observers missed changes even if they were allowed to view the original image for 8 sec prior to the change. They reasoned that this should have been ample time for completion of visual processing and, thus, the failure to detect changes was not due to a failure to ever attend to the information from the first scene.…”

“…The observers may have failed to detect changes because the to-be-changed items were of marginal interest and were therefore never processed. Indeed, Rensink et al (2000) found that change blindness is much more likely to arise for items of marginal interest than for those of focal interest.…”

A general method for the point of regard estimation in 3D space

“…Likewise time-space completeness includes the compatibility of frequency of acquisition with the receptive fields response and the coverage of the observer field of view. In particular, the percentage of fixations captured should cope with a natural time delay for a fixation such as 100ms and change blindness [13,16]. In this paper we report on the essential aspects of the gaze localisation model and, in the experiments section, we show that our system correctly estimates the observed point, up to an error that we quantify.…”

“…here E(·) is the error function defined in equation (13). Indeed, for any candidate Q j 0 the mean of the err function is computed on a set of n conics.…”