Influence of semantic factors on blindness to progressive changes in visual scenes.

Several studies have shown that under some circumstances observers have difficulty detecting changes that occur in successive views of a visual scene. Recent work has confirmed this finding in situations in which the change, instead of occurring abruptly, is made gradually but in full view. This work suggests that observers have access only to a small portion of the information available in a scene. The question arises, what determines which information will be accessed ? The experiments reported here first confirm that change blindness can be obtained using progressive changes in full view. Second, they investigate the influence on change detection of two semantic factors interest)) of scene elements and their much less than consistency much greater than within the scene. We show that change detection improves as a function of the much less than interest much greater than of an element and as a function of its degree of much less than inconsistency much greater than. within the scene. The general discussion provides possible explanations of these results and their implications to the study of the nature of our representations.