The effects of scene inversion on change blindness.
In two experiments, participants searched for a difference between two views of a scene. In Experiment 1, the authors extended the change-blindness findings from previous work by R. A. Rensink, J. K. O'Regan, and J. J. Clark (1997), which used an experimenter-induced global transient, to a less artificial situation in which participants searched for a difference in a pair of photographic images presented simultaneously. To examine the idea that meaning-driven endogenous orienting was responsible for the previously observed advantage for changes in center-of-interest items, the authors inverted half of the image pairs. The advantage for center-of-interest items was replicated with upright displays, but it was completely eliminated by inversion, strongly supporting the role of meaning-driven endogenous orienting in this task. With flickering displays (Experiment 2), the center-of-interest effect was completely unaffected by inversion. The authors suggest that when change blindness is induced via flicker, scene modifications are typically found by stimulus-driven rather than by meaning-driven processes.
Shore
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DI
Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada. dshore@or.psychology.dal.ca
Klein
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RM
D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*