An overview is presented of the ways that change blindness has been applied to the study of various issues in perception and cognition. Topics include mechanisms of change perception, allocation of attention, nonconscious perception, and cognitive beliefs. Recent work using change blindness to investigate these topics is surveyed, along with a brief discussion of some of the ways that these approaches may further develop over the next few years.

抄録全体を表示

The present study brings together two research directions which have been developed in this decade: social attention by gaze cueing and change blindness in shape perception. To integrate these research directions, we examined the early component of social attention triggered by the interpretation of another person's eye gaze in the change detection task with the flicker paradigm. In the early stages before 0.5 s from the beginning of the flickering presentation, congruency of gaze cueing yielded superior performance in detecting changes of simple geometric shapes presented on the side congruent with the eye gaze direction compared with the opposite side incongruent with it. Time course analysis showed that this advantage by gaze cueing diminished in the late stages after 0.5 s. This short-term effect of gaze cueing on change detection reflected an early component of social attention.

抄録全体を表示

The effects of prior experience often persist despite their futility. For example, vision scientists who have a long experience of a particular change blindness display are compelled to look at the location of the expected change even when they know that a change will not occur at the same location (Takahashi & Watanabe, 2008). Here, we investigated the types of experience that are required to form the persistent bias. Naive observers performed a typical change blindness task. Before the task, they repeatedly experienced the detection of a change in an identical display. The prior experience produced a gaze bias toward the experienced target. However, the bias decreased after the observers became aware that a change would not occur at the same location. These results suggest that prior experience immediately modulates visual search; however, repetitive detection was not sufficient for producing the persistent bias as observed in the case of vision scientists.

抄録全体を表示

In proofreading, attention must be allocated to the entire text in order to detect anomalous words within the sentence context. Because professional proofreaders have superior control of spatial attentional allocation, it is hypothesized that their skill may generalize to certain other tasks. To test this hypothesis, professional proofreaders were compared to novices using change blindness and visual search tasks. Results of the change blindness task showed that proofreaders detected more targets (non-predesignated scene changes) than novices by allocating attention to the entire scene. By contrast, novices' attention tended to be attracted to the upper part of visual scenes. Results of the visual search task, which involved counting predesignated targets, showed no performance differences between proofreaders and novices. This implies that proofreaders have a highly developed ability for spatial attentional allocation that is generally applicable to attentional demanding search situations where both detection targets and distractors are not predesignated.

抄録全体を表示

The phenomenon of change blindness has received a great deal of attention during the last decade, but very few experiments have examined the effects of the subjective importance of the visual stimuli under study. We have addressed this question in a series of studies by introducing choice as a critical variable in change detection (see Johansson, Hall, Sikström, & Olsson, 2005, Johansson, Hall, Sikström, & Tärning, 2006). In the present study, participants were asked to choose which of two pictures they found more attractive. For stimuli we used both pairs of abstract patterns and female faces. Sometimes the pictures were switched during to choice procedure, leading to a reversal of the initial choice of the participants. Surprisingly, the subjects seldom noticed the switch, and in a post-test memory task, they also often remembered the manipulated choice as being their own. In combination with our previous findings, this result indicates that we often fail to notice changes in the world even if they have later consequences for our own actions.

抄録全体を表示