Ways of processing semantic information during different change detection tasks

Abstract

Recent research on change blindness phenomenon revealed contradictory findings about scene-object relationship. These discrepant results might be stemming from procedure and task constraints. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the effect of the type of paradigm on change blindness phenomenon during the natural scene viewing in the frame of high-level scene perception. For this purpose, we compared two frequently used change detection tasks; flicker and one-shot paradigms. Additionally, eye movements were recorded to investigate the active attention mechanisms during the change detection performance. Our results suggested that change detection performance and eye movements varied across the different paradigms. We interpreted this result as the influence of different stimuli exposures and different interruptions on processing of visual stimuli during the detection of change. We explained the inconsistent results revealed by the previous research in terms of attention mechanisms, namely attention attraction and attention disengagement that might differ while performing the different change detection tasks.