To See or not to See: The Need for Attention to Perceive Changes in Scenes

Abstract

When looking at a scene, observers feel that they see its entire structure in great detail and can immediately notice any changes in it However, when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced Identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly Identification is much faster when a verbal cue is provided showing that poor visibility is not the cause of this difficulty Identification is also faster for objects considered to be important in the scene These results support the idea that observers never form a complete, detailed representation of their surroundings In addition, the results indicate that attention is required to perceive change, and that in the absence of localized motion signals attention is guided on the basis of high-level interest

Successive two-item same-different discrimination and concept learning by pigeons

“…Similar problems in detecting change or difference can occur in humans when focused attention is not specifically brought to the area of the display that is continuously changing (e.g. Rensink et al, 1997). A pure size account of this "change blindness" in pigeons seems unlikely because of the numerous studies that have found that pigeons can discriminate comparably sized stimuli, Fig.…”

“…In humans, detecting certain kinds of changes or difference between successively presented pictures seems to require focused attention to be specifically brought to the area of the display that is changing (e.g. Rensink et al, 1997). In fact, very large changes can often go unnoticed by people in scenes without such selection (Simons and Levin, 1998).…”

“…At the start of the experiment, one of our ancillary objectives was also to develop potential procedures for evaluating "change blindness" (e.g. Rensink et al, 1997) in pigeons. Change blindness is the human failure to detect visual change in a scene without attention to the specific locus of change.…”

The Neural-Cognitive Basis of the Jamesian Stream of Thought

“…Simply put: Auditory regions are more interconnected with each other than they are with visual regions and vice versa. Scannell,8 A relevant perceptual phenomenon is scene change blindness (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). In this paradigm, subjects view two scenes that are identical except for one detail.…”

Substantive Thoughts about Substantive Thoughts: A Reply to Galin

“…Under this hypothesis, recognition of an object involves the establishment of a temporary connection with LTM that disappears when one moves onto another object. As Wolfe et al note, the striking inability of subject to notice changes in the unattended part of the scene during change blindness experiments (Rensink et al, 1997;Simons & Levin, 1997) might be one consequence of this inability to simultaneously maintain more than one perceptual-LTM link. Interestingly, Henderson and Hollingworth (1999) found that subjects in a change blindness experiment tended to notice scene changes made during saccades only when the saccades were to or from the changed object or when the subject subsequently refixated the changed object.…”