Current Approaches to Change Blindness

Across saccades, blinks, blank screens, movie cuts, and other interruptions, observers fail to detect substantial changes to the visual details of objects and scenes. This inability to spot changes (“change blindness”) is the focus of this special issue of Visual Cognition. This introductory paper briefly reviews recent studies of change blindness, noting the relation of these findings to earlier research and discussing the inferences we can draw from them. Most explanations of change blindness assume that we fail to detect changes because the changed display masks or overwrites the initial display. Here I draw a distinction between intentional and incidental change detection tasks and consider how alternatives to the “overwriting” explanation may provide better explanations for change blindness.

[1]  F. Bartlett,et al.  Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology , 1932 .

[2]  R. S. French.  The discrimination of dot patterns as a function of number and average separation of dots. , 1953, Journal of Experimental Psychology.

[3]  H. Quastler.  Information theory in psychology : problems and methods , 1955 .

[4]  George Sperling,et al.  The information available in brief visual presentations. , 1960 .

[5]  R. Shepard.  Recognition memory for words, sentences, and pictures , 1967 .

[6]  J. M. Stroud.  THE FINE STRUCTURE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME , 1967 .

[7]  D. Kahneman.  Method, findings, and theory in studies of visual masking. , 1968, Psychological bulletin.

[8]  M. Potter,et al.  Recognition memory for a rapid sequence of pictures. , 1969, Journal of experimental psychology.

[9]  R. Haber,et al.  Perception and memory for pictures: Single-trial learning of 2500 visual stimuli , 1970 .

[10]  John D. Bransford,et al.  The abstraction of linguistic ideas , 1971 .

[11]  L. Standing.  Learning 10,000 pictures. , 1973, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[12]  W. A. Phillips.  On the distinction between sensory storage and short-term visual memory , 1974 .

[13]  I. Biederman,et al.  On the information extracted from a glance at a scene. , 1974, Journal of experimental psychology.

[14]  E. Hilgard,et al.  Visual imagery and the discrimination of differences between altered pictures simultaneously and successively presented. , 1975, British journal of psychology.

[15]  Bruce Bridgeman,et al.  Failure to detect displacement of the visual world during saccadic eye movements , 1975, Vision Research.

[16]  M. Potter.  Short-term conceptual memory for pictures. , 1976, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[17]  R. Nickerson,et al.  Long-term memory for a common object , 1979, Cognitive Psychology.

[18]  J. Gibson.  The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception , 1979 .

[19]  A. Friedman.  Framing pictures: the role of knowledge in automatized encoding and memory for gist. , 1979, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[20]  G. McConkie,et al.  Is visual information integrated across successive fixations in reading? , 1979, Perception & psychophysics.

[21]  H. Intraub,et al.  Presentation rate and the representation of briefly glimpsed pictures in memory. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[22]  H. Intraub.  Rapid conceptual identification of sequentially presented pictures. , 1981 .

[23]  B. Bridgeman,et al.  Failure to integrate visual information from successive fixations , 1983 .

[24]  David E. Irwin,et al.  Failure to integrate information from successive fixations. , 1983, Science.

[25]  K. Rayner,et al.  Is visual information integrated across saccades? , 1983, Perception & psychophysics.

[26]  David E. Irwin,et al.  Evidence against visual integration across saccadic eye movements , 1983, Perception & psychophysics.

[27]  W. E. Collins,et al.  Integrating pictorial information across eye movements. , 1984, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[28]  H. Intraub.  Visual dissociation: an illusory conjunction of pictures and forms. , 1985, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[29]  W A Wagenaar,et al.  The fate of memory: comment on McCloskey and Zaragoza. , 1985, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[30]  Michael McCloskey,et al.  Postevent information and memory: Reply to Loftus, Schooler, and Wagenaar , 1985 .

[31]  J. Feldman.  Four frames suffice: A provisional model of vision and space , 1985, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[32]  Julian Hochberg,et al.  Representation of motion and space in video and cinematic displays , 1986 .

[33]  David E. Irwin,et al.  Sensory registration and informational persistence. , 1986, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[34]  N. Kanwisher.  Repetition blindness: Type recognition without token individuation , 1987, Cognition.

[35]  D. Schacter.  Implicit memory: History and current status. , 1987 .

[36]  H Pashler,et al.  Familiarity and visual change detection , 1988, Perception & psychophysics.

[37]  Anne Treisman,et al.  Visual Information-Processing in the Perception of Features and Objects , 1988 .

[38]  David E. Irwin,et al.  Visual masking and visual integration across saccadic eye movements. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[39]  H. Intraub.  Illusory conjunctions of forms, objects, and scenes during rapid serial visual search. , 1989, Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory and Cognition.

[40]  D. Dennett.  Consciousness Explained. Boston (Little, Brown and Co) 1991. , 1991 .

[41]  R. A. Brooks,et al.  Intelligence without Representation , 1991, Artif. Intell..

[42]  David E. Irwin.  Information integration across saccadic eye movements , 1991, Cognitive Psychology.

[43]  Alexander Pollatsek,et al.  What Is Integrated Across Fixations , 1992 .

[44]  I. Rock,et al.  Perceptual organization and attention , 1992, Cognitive Psychology.

[45]  K. Rayner.  Eye movements and visual cognition : scene perception and reading , 1992 .

[46]  J. O'Regan,et al.  Solving the "real" mysteries of visual perception: the world as an outside memory. , 1992, Canadian journal of psychology.

[47]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Attention : selection, awareness, and control : a tribute to Donald Broadbent , 1996 .

[48]  Arnold Trehub,et al.  What does calibration solve? , 1994, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[49]  G. Brelstaff,et al.  Is the Richness of Our Visual World an Illusion? Transsaccadic Memory for Complex Scenes , 1995, Perception.

[50]  D. Simons.  In Sight, Out of Mind: When Object Representations Fail , 1996 .

[51]  J. Grimes.  On the failure to detect changes in scenes across saccades. , 1996 .

[52]  D. L. Hintzman,et al.  First impressions are lasting impressions: A primacy effect in memory for repetitions , 1997 .

[53]  Ronald A. Rensink,et al.  TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE: The Need for Attention to Perceive Changes in Scenes , 1997 .

[54]  K. Shapiro,et al.  The attentional blink , 1997, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[55]  Rajesh P. N. Rao,et al.  Embodiment is the foundation, not a level , 1996, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[56]  John M. Henderson,et al.  Transsaccadic Memory and Integration During Real-World Object Perception , 1997 .

[57]  D. Simons,et al.  Failure to detect changes to attended objects in motion pictures , 1997 .

[58]  D. Simons,et al.  Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction , 1998 .

[59]  Ranxiao Frances Wang,et al.  Perceiving Real-World Viewpoint Changes , 1998 .

[60]  Ronald A. Rensink,et al.  Change-blindness as a result of ‘mudsplashes’ , 1999, Nature.

[61]  泽熙.  信息时代的in the Information管理 , 2000 .

[62]  J. Wolfe.  Inattentional Amnesia , 2000 .