Did you see that?

How much of our visual world do we remember from one moment to the next? Do we have an accurate ‘photograph’ in our head or do we just remember bits and pieces? Research using displays like the one below have found that we are surprisingly bad at detecting large and salient visual changes.

 

Look the demonstration to the left and try to find the change. You may experience that you have to actively move your attention from item to item (or location to location) until you’ve found it. Recent research has suggested that we may be able to implicitly, or covertly, detect such changes even if we don’t realize it. However, our lab has raised a number of concerns with such claims and has concluded that explicit awareness may in fact be necessary to detect visual changes.

 

Related papers:

Mitroff, S. R., Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (2004). Nothing compares 2 views: Change blindness can occur despite preserved access to the changed information. Perception & Psychophysics, 66, 1268-1281.

Mitroff, S. R. & Simons, D. J. (2002). Changes are not localized until they are explicitly detected. Visual Cognition, 9, 937 - 968.

Mitroff, S. R., Simons, D. J., & Franconeri, S. L. (2002). The siren song of implicit change detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 28(4), 798 - 815.

Simons, D. J., Mitroff, S. R., & Franconeri, S. L. (2003). Scene perception: What we can learn from visual integration and change detection. In M. Peterson & G. Rhodes (Eds.), Perception of faces, objects, and scenes: Analytic and holistic processes. Advances in visual cognition. London: Oxford University Press.