Change Blindness and Visual Memory A Special Issue of Visual Cognition

A central goal in the study of object and scene perception is to understand how visual information is integrated across views to provide a stable, continuous experience of our environment. Research on issues ranging from visual masking to priming across saccades to the representation of spatial layout across views has addressed the issue of what information is preserved from one view to the next. Recently, research on visual memory for objects and scenes has led to striking claims about the nature of the information that is and is not preserved from one instant to the next. For example, studies of change blindness have shown that striking changes to objects and scenes can go undetected when they coincide with an eye movement, a flashed blank screen, a blink, or an occlusion event. These studies suggest that relatively little visual information about objects and scenes is combined across views. Despite these failures of change detection, observers somehow manage to experience a stable, continuous visual environment. This special issue seeks to unite recent studies of change blindness with studies of visual integration to better understand the nature of our representations and the richness of our visual memory.

D.J. Simons, Current Approaches to Change Blindness. R.A. Rensink, The Dynamic Representation of Scenes. M. Hayhoe, Vision Using Routines: A Functional Account of Vision. M.M. Chun, K. Nakayama, On the Functional Role of Implicit Visual Memory for the Adaptive Deployment of Attention Across Scenes. K.L. Shapiro, Change Blindness: Theory or Paradigm? A. Noë, L. Pessoa, E. Thompson, Beyond the Grand Illusion: What Change Blindness Really Teaches Us About Vision. J.R. Pani, Cognitive Description and Change Blindness. R.A. Rensink, J.K. O'Regan, J.J. Clark, On the Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes Across Brief Interruptions. V. Aginsky, M.J. Tarr, How Are Different Properties of a Scene Encoded in Visual Memory? S. Werner, B. Thies, Is "Change Blindness" Attenuated by Domain-specific Expertise? An Expert-Novices Comparison of Change Detection in Football Images. G. Wallis, H. Bülthoff, What's Scene and Not Seen: Influences of Movement and Task Upon What We See. J.K. O'Regan, H. Deubel, J.J. Clark, R.A. Rensink, Picture Changes During Blinks: Looking Without Seeing and Seeing Without Looking. A. Hollingworth, J.M. Henderson, Semantic Informativeness Mediates the Detection of Changes in Natural Scenes. M. Wright, A. Green, S. Baker, Limitations for Change Detection in Multiple Gabor Targets. K.C. Scott-Brown, M.R. Baker, H.S. Orbach, Comparison Blindness. J. Lachter, F. Durgin, T. Washington, Disappearing Percepts: Evidence for Retention Failure in Metacontrast Masking. S. Mondy, V. Coltheart, Detection and Identification of Change in Naturalistic Scenes. P. Williams, D.J. Simons, Detecting Changes in Novel, Complex Three-dimensional Objects. D. Fernandez-Duque, I.M. Thornton, Change Detection Without Awareness: Do Explicit Reports Underestimate the Representation of Change in the Visual System? R.A. Rensink, Visual Search for Change: A Probe into the Nature of Attentional Processing. B.J. Scholl, Attenuated Change Blindness for Exogenously Attended Items in a Flicker Program. D.T. Levin, N. Momen, S.B. Drivdahl, D.J. Simons, Change Blindness Blindness: The Metacognitive Error of Overestimating Change-detection Ability.