Detecting multiple simultaneous and sequential feature changes

The failure to notice changes to objects is called change blindness, and it is often studied with the flicker task. Observers performing this task see two rapidly alternating but slightly different stimulus displays that are usually photos of real-world scenes. In order to detect the change, they must compare objects in the pre-change scene with objects at the same locations in the post-change scene to determine whether they are the same or different. It has been proposed that change blindness can occur when the memory representation of a pre-change object is incomplete and thereby impairs the same/different comparison with the post-change object at the same location. It has also been proposed that even with intact pre-change object memory representations, failure of same/different comparisons for other reasons can cause change blindness. The goal of the current study was to conduct flicker task experiments to examine both proposals. We conducted the current experiments with non-photographic stimuli, varied the degree of feature-based change of colored lines and found that the greater degree of change, the faster the same/different comparisons, and the faster that changes were detected. We also examined the representation integrity account of change blindness by comparing detection times of target objects that underwent a single feature change with those that underwent multiple sequential feature changes. The latter were detected faster, which suggests that multiple identities of these sequentially changing objects were stored in memory and facilitated change detection. In another experiment we found that objects that underwent multiple sequential feature changes were not detected as fast as those that underwent multiple simultaneous feature changes. This is consistent with the representation account of change blindness and suggests that memories of multiple sequentially changing object identities are transient and may become less complete over time. And more generally that multiple simultaneous and multiple sequential feature-based changes to these stimuli can show the extent to which memory is involved when searching for flicker task targets. The results of the current study indicate that both the comparison failure and the representation integrity proposals can account for change blindness.