Reflexive attention attenuates change blindness (but only briefly).
Humans are remarkably insensitive to large changes in a visual display if the change occurs simultaneously with a secondary perceptual event. A widely held view is that this change blindness occurs because the secondary perceptual event prevents the change from capturing attention. However, whereas some studies have shown that top-down attentional priming can attenuate change blindness, the evidence regarding the effect of bottom-up attentional capture on change blindness is less clear-cut. Here, we compare the effects of attentional capture on change detection with participants' performance on a well-established attentional paradigm (a Posner-style cuing task). Experiment 1 established the time course of attentional capture in our paradigm. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this attentional capture was associated with facilitated change detection at short (150-msec), but not long (480-msec), latencies. These data show that reflexive attentional shifts facilitate change detection and are consistent with the view that shifts of attention are a necessary precondition for visual awareness.
Smith
D T
DT
Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, Wolfson Research Institute, University of Durham, Stockton-on-Tees, England. daniel.smith2@durham.ac.uk
Schenk
T
T
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014796:Visual Perception