The Roles of Scene Characteristics, Memory and Attentional Breadth on the Representation of Complex Real -World Scenes

Abstract : An accurate and detailed representation of the environment is presumed to help observers notice when an object moves or changes. Unfortunately, when change in the environment coincides with an interruption to the ongoing visual processing, observers are surprisingly slow to detect the change, if at all, The factors that play a role in the ability to detect scene changes in the face of interruptions caused by "flicker" are the focus of the research discussed here. Two experiments investigated the roles of intrinsic factors (e.g., attentional breadth, inhibition, perceptual speed, working memory) and extrinsic factors (e.g., change characteristics, scene context) in change detection performance with young and old adults participants. Results indicated that perceptual change detection was best characterized by attentional breadth and visuo-spatial working memory measures. To a lesser extent, perceptual speed was also associated with change detection performance, but the ability to inhibit irrelevant information (i.e., inhibition) had no detectable, independent relationship. Findings also revealed that change meaningfulness had a smaller impact on performance than did salience, especially for the older adults. Examination of eye movements indicated that early in their viewing of the scene, older adults landed on highly meaningful changes that were also of low salience; however, they were not able to explicitly detect the change. Further assessment of eye movements suggested that fixating the change did not ensure detection, rather the duration of processing in the change area increased the likelihood of successfully detecting the change and older adults required longer processing times than younger adults.