Volatile visual representations: failing to detect changes in recently processed information.

Full Abstract

Research documenting people's inability to detect large changes in visual scenes suggests that visual representations may be sparse and volatile, providing no cumulative record of the attended items in a scene. However, these studies have failed to control for attention. Thus, the visual system may construct a cumulative record of all attended stimuli and still miss such changes, because they involve items that were never attended to. In two experiments, subjects saw 12-digit arrays and identified either the highest digit in the array (Experiment 1) or the lowest digit not in the array (Experiment 2). Subsequent change-detection tasks revealed that subjects often failed to detect changes that involved the same digits they had previously identified to perform the digit tasks successfully. This provides additional evidence that our usable visual representations are relatively impoverished and volatile.

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Author information

Author/s: Becker, Mark W (MW); Pashler, Harold (H);

Affiliation: University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA. mbecker@lclark.edu

Grants: MH45584 (Agency:United States NIMH)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

Journal: Psychonomic bulletin & review (Psychon Bull Rev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Dec; vol 9 (issue 4) : pp 744-50

Dates: Created 2003/03/04; Completed 2003/07/03; Revised 2007/11/14;

PMID: 12613678, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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