Visual marking and change blindness: moving occluders and transient masks neutralize shape changes to ignored objects.
Visual search efficiency improves by presenting (previewing) one set of distractors before the target and remaining distractor items (D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 1997). Previous work has shown that this preview benefit is abolished if the old items change their shape when the new items are added (e.g., D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 2002). Here we present 5 experiments that examined whether such object changes are still effective in recapturing attention if the changes occur while the previewed objects are occluded or masked. Overall, the findings suggest that masking transients are effective in preventing both object changes and the presentation of new objects from capturing attention in time-based visual search conditions. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of change blindness, new object capture, and the ecological properties of time-based visual selection.
Watson
Derrick G
DG
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. d.g.watson@warwick.ac.uk
Kunar
Melina A
MA
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D054518:Attentional Blink; D001364:Awareness; D003118:Color Perception; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult