Change Blindness

Although phenomena such as change blindness and inattentional blindness are robust, it is not entirely clear how these failures of visual awareness are related to failures to attend to visual information, to represent it, and to ultimately learn in visual environments. On some views, failures of visual awareness such as change blindness underestimate the true extent of otherwise rich visual representations. This might occur if people did represent the changing features but failed to compare them across views. In contrast, other approaches emphasize visual representations that are created only when they are functional. On this view, change blindness may be associated with poor representations of the changing properties. It is possible to compromise and propose that representational richness varies across contexts, but then it becomes important to detail relationships among attention, awareness, and learning in specific, but applicable, settings. We therefore assessed these relationships in an important visual setting: screen-captured instructional videos. In two experiments, we tested the degree to which attention (as measured by gaze) predicts change detection, and whether change detection is associated with visual representations and content learning. We observed that attention sometimes predicted change detection, and that change detection was associated with representations of attended objects. However, there was no relationship between change detection and learning.

Change blindness is the inability to note large changes in two similar photos or video sequences. In the last decade research carried out to understand this phenomenon has given a new understanding of human perceptual system. This understanding can help in solving some of the problems associated with the transmission of video in a synchronous e-learning tool. The paper describes (a) cinematic principles in recording lectures; (b) the concept of change blindness; (c) the ways its understanding can help in making the presentation of video more engrossing; (d) the guidelines it can provide to remove redundant data and enhance the quality of important sections of the video frame so as to improve the transmission of video; and (e) proposed scheme to stream video sequence having optimum perceptual quality by dynamically controlling frame rate and resolution, taking into considerations the concepts of change blindness.

The change blindness phenomenon suggests that visual representations retained across saccades are very limited. In this paper we sought to specify the kind of information that is in fact retained. We investigated targeting performance for saccadic eye movements, since one need for visual representations across eye and body positions may be to guide coordinated movements. We examined saccades in the context of an ongoing sensory motor task in order to make stronger generalizations about natural visual functioning and deployment of attention. Human subjects copied random patterns of coloured blocks on a computer display. Their eye movement pattern was consistent from block to block, including a precise saccade to a previously-placed, neighbouring block during each additional block placement. This natural, consistent eye movement allowed the previously-placed, neighbouring block to serve as an implicit target without instructions to the subject. On random trials, we removed the target object from the display during a preceding saccade, so that observers were required to make the targeting saccade without a currently visible target. Targeting performance was excellent, and appeared to be influenced by spatial information that was not visible during the preceding fixation. Subjects were generally unaware of the disappearance and reappearance of the target. We conclude that spatial information about visual targets is retained across eye movements and used to guide subsequent movements. A variety of recent findings demonstrate that observers are profoundly insensitive to changes in visual displays made in the presence of some kind of spatial Correspondence should be addressed to M.

This case study explores the challenges and rehabilitation counseling strategies for Mark, a 29-
year-old middle school art teacher from Santa Fe, NM, diagnosed with nonproliferative diabetic
retinopathy. The study highlights the biopsychosocial impacts of visual impairment due to
diabetic retinopathy on individuals in visually demanding professions. Through an analysis of
Mark's journey, the study underscores the importance of tailored rehabilitation counseling
interventions, including vocational rehabilitation, assistive technology, and psychosocial support,
to facilitate adaptation and maintain employment. Recommendations for practice and future
research are discussed.
Keywords: Diabetic Retinopathy, Rehabilitation Counseling, Visual Impairment, Vocational
Rehabilitation, Assistive Technology, Biopsychosocial Model, Art Education.

There have been relatively few attempts to represent vision or blindness ontologically. This is unsurprising as the related phenomena of sight and blindness are difficult to represent ontologically for a variety of reasons. Blindness has escaped ontological capture at least in part because: blindness or the employment of the term 'blindness' seems to vary from context to context, blindness can present in a myriad of types and degrees, and there is no precedent for representing complex phenomena such as blindness. We explore current attempts to represent vision or blindness, and show how these attempts fail at representing subtypes of blindness (viz., color blindness, flash blindness, and inattentional blindness). We examine the results found through a review of current attempts and identify where they have failed. By analyzing our test cases of different types of blindness along with the strengths and weaknesses of previous attempts, we have identified the general features o...

Limits on perceptual capacity result in various phenomena of inattentional blindness. Here we propose a neurophysiological account attributing these perceptual capacity limits directly to limits on cerebral cellular metabolism. We hypothesized that overall cerebral energy supply remains constant, regardless of overall mental processing demands; therefore, an attention mechanism is required to regulate limited cellular metabolism levels in line with attended task demands. Increased perceptual load in a task (imposing a greater demand on neural computations) should thus result in increased metabolism underlying attended processing, and reduced metabolism mediating unattended processing. We tested this prediction measuring oxidation states of cytochrome c oxidase (oxCCO), an intracellular marker of cellular metabolism. Broadband near-infrared spectroscopy was used to record oxCCO levels from human visual cortex while participants (both sexes) performed a rapid sequential visual search task under either high perceptual load (complex feature-conjunction search) or low load (feature pop-out search). A task-irrelevant, peripheral checkerboard was presented on a random half of trials. Our findings showed that oxCCO levels in visual cortex regions responsive to the attended-task stimuli were increased in high versus low perceptual load, whereas oxCCO levels related to unattended processing were significantly reduced. A negative temporal correlation of these load effects further supported our metabolism trade-off account. These results demonstrate an attentional compensation mechanism that regulates cellular metabolism levels according to processing demands. Moreover, they provide novel evidence for the widely held stipulation that overall cerebral metabolism levels remain constant regardless of mental task demand and establish a neurophysiological account for capacity limits in perception.

Unconscious processing has been widely examined using diverse and well-controlled methodologies. However, the extent to which these findings are relevant to real-life instances of information processing without awareness is limited. Here, we present a novel inattentional blindness (IB) paradigm in virtual reality (VR). In three experiments, we managed to repeatedly induce IB while participants foveally viewed salient stimuli for prolonged durations. The effectiveness of this paradigm demonstrates the close relationship between top-down attention and subjective experience. Thus, this method provides an ecologically valid setup to examine processing without awareness.

Numbers convey different meanings when used in different contexts . In a cardinal context, a number will tell us how many entities are in a set and convey quantity meaning. In an ordinal context, a number will refer to the relative position (or rank) of one element within a sequence; non-numerical ordered series (e.g. the letters of the alphabet) can also be used to provide meaningful order information. Because quantity and order are linked up with each other in the cognitive number domain (the larger the quantity a number refers to, the later it is located in the conventional number sequence), the question of whether they rely on some common or distinct underlying mechanism(s) is theoretically relevant and was addressed in the present thesis. Experimental studies showed evidence of both similarities (similar distance and SNARC effects, recruitment of parietal and frontal regions, and conjoint impairment or preservation after brain damage) and dissociations (different developmental course, dissociation after cerebral lesion, and specific behavioural markers) between quantity and order neuro-functional processes. The aim of the present thesis was to clarify the relationship between numerical quantity and order processing and to test the hypothesis that they rely on (at least partially) dissociated mechanisms. We tested this hypothesis in a single case study, an electrophysiological study and in two behavioural experiments. In the neuropsychological study, we reported the case of patient CO, who showed Gerstmann syndrome after bilateral parietal damage and beca...

This is an exploratory study investigating potential effects of emotional valence in images and their influence on conversation in the presence of the images. We used latent-semantic analysis to generalize valence ratings of Swedish words to a corpus of spoken conversations. Each utterance in the conversation was given a valence rating, which represented how emotionally positive or emotionally negative the utterance was. We found no effects that indicate that valenced images have an effect on conversations. However, we find that valenced images in general, and positive images in particular, were considered more helpful by the participants who engaged in the conversations. Additionally, we find no results that interlocutors align over time in their use of valenced language.

The authors explored the relevance of research on change blindness to eyewitness identification and testimony under intentional and incidental memory conditions. Participants (N = 80, 40 men and 40 women) viewed a video enactment of a burglary in which the identity of the burglar changed at the halfway point of the film. Half of participants were briefed to remember the content, and the other half were not. All were tested for the recall of the content, awareness of the change, and ability to identify either or both of the burglars. Some 61% of participants did not notice the identity change. Rates of detection were significantly higher in participants in the intentional condition, who also recalled significantly more detail from the film. Awareness of change was also significantly related to content recall scores and accuracy of identification of both burglars. The results illustrate the interrelation between the eyewitness and change blindness literatures.

Change blindness on web pages was studied for 20 participants. The purpose was to find how change blindness appears for web pages, and which changes are easier to detect. The task was to detect if a change had occurred and to show this by the means of the cursor. Rensink´s flicker paradigm was used, where four categories of changes were presented. It was easier to detect a change not consisting of a person than one with a person. It was easier to detect a change to the left than to the right. The complexity of the web pages did not appear to have an effect, while large changes were easier to detect than small. The results may indicate that focused attention is differently sensitive for different kinds of changes. They also show that change blindness is a general phenomenon that can be applied to the perception of web pages.

Capacity limitations in the way humans store and process information in working memory have been extensively studied, and several memory systems have been distinguished. In line with previous capacity estimates for verbal memory and memory for spatial information, recent studies suggest that it is possible to retain up to four objects in visual working memory. The objects used have typically been categorically different colors and shapes. Because knowledge about categories is stored in long-term memory, these estimations of working memory capacity have been contaminated by long-term memory support. We show that when using clearly distinguishable intracategorical items, visual working memory has a maximum capacity of only one object. Because attention is closely involved in the working memory process, our results add to other studies demonstrating capacity limitations of human attention such as inattentional blindness and change blindness.

Capacity limits in perception can lead to failures of awareness in situations that overload capacity, resulting in various phenomena of 'inattentional blindness'. In contrast, capacity limits in cognitive control over attention by working memory lead to increased processing of irrelevant distractors (reduced inattentional blindness). Here, using Voxel-Based Morphometry combined with Principal Components Analysis, we establish distinct brainstructural correlates of perceptual capacity, dissociable from those of cognitive control. Perceptual capacity was measured as the principal component accounting for variance across tasks of multiple object tracking, change blindness and rapid visual enumeration (i.e. 'subitizing'). Cognitive control capacity was measured as the principal component underlying performance of three different complex working memory span tasks (involving spatial, semantic and numerical domains). Volumetric differences in the right Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL) were predictive of individual differences in perceptual capacity, while volumetric differences in left Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG) (as well as lateral frontal and posterior cingulate cortex in a non-parametric analysis) were predictive of individual differences in cognitive control capacity. IPL remained a significant predictor of perceptual capacity when controlling for variance accounted for by cognitive control capacity and vice versa for the neural correlates of cognitive control. These results suggest that perceptual and cognitive control capacities represent dissociable and lasting, trait-like attributes which can be predicted from distinct signatures in regional grey matter.

Limited capacity for visual perception results in various 'inattentional blindness' phenomena across a wide variety of manipulations which load perception. Here we propose that these phenomena are mediated by an underlying generalised capacity for visual perception which also underlies subitizing: the ability to enumerate a limited number of items in parallel from a brief exposure. We tested this proposal by examining whether individual differences can reveal common intra-individual variance between measures of visual perception as well as of subitizing capacity. Visual perception was measured in change blindness (Rensink et al., 1997), load-Induced blindness (Macdonald & Lavie, 2008), and multiple object tracking tasks. Subitizing capacity was measured as the number of items that could be reported in parallel in an enumeration task. Perceptual capacity as indexed by subitizing was consistently a unique predictor of performance in change blindness, load-induced blindness, and motion tracking beyond any general factors that apply to both subitizing and estimation of larger set sizes. Moreover when measures of working memory were included, factor analysis indicated two orthogonal factors: perceptual and working memory. Overall, the results support the hypothesis of a generalised capacity for visual perception, and establish subitizing capacity as a predictor of individual susceptibility to inattentional blindness under load.

Capacity limits in perception can lead to failures of awareness in situations that overload capacity, resulting in various phenomena of 'inattentional blindness'. In contrast, capacity limits in cognitive control over attention by working memory lead to increased processing of irrelevant distractors (reduced inattentional blindness). Here, using Voxel-Based Morphometry combined with Principal Components Analysis, we establish distinct brainstructural correlates of perceptual capacity, dissociable from those of cognitive control. Perceptual capacity was measured as the principal component accounting for variance across tasks of multiple object tracking, change blindness and rapid visual enumeration (i.e. 'subitizing'). Cognitive control capacity was measured as the principal component underlying performance of three different complex working memory span tasks (involving spatial, semantic and numerical domains). Volumetric differences in the right Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL) were predictive of individual differences in perceptual capacity, while volumetric differences in left Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG) (as well as lateral frontal and posterior cingulate cortex in a non-parametric analysis) were predictive of individual differences in cognitive control capacity. IPL remained a significant predictor of perceptual capacity when controlling for variance accounted for by cognitive control capacity and vice versa for the neural correlates of cognitive control. These results suggest that perceptual and cognitive control capacities represent dissociable and lasting, trait-like attributes which can be predicted from distinct signatures in regional grey matter.

Limited capacity for visual perception results in various 'inattentional blindness' phenomena across a wide variety of manipulations which load perception. Here we propose that these phenomena are mediated by an underlying generalised capacity for visual perception which also underlies subitizing: the ability to enumerate a limited number of items in parallel from a brief exposure. We tested this proposal by examining whether individual differences can reveal common intra-individual variance between measures of visual perception as well as of subitizing capacity. Visual perception was measured in change blindness (Rensink et al., 1997), load-Induced blindness (Macdonald & Lavie, 2008), and multiple object tracking tasks. Subitizing capacity was measured as the number of items that could be reported in parallel in an enumeration task. Perceptual capacity as indexed by subitizing was consistently a unique predictor of performance in change blindness, load-induced blindness, and motion tracking beyond any general factors that apply to both subitizing and estimation of larger set sizes. Moreover when measures of working memory were included, factor analysis indicated two orthogonal factors: perceptual and working memory. Overall, the results support the hypothesis of a generalised capacity for visual perception, and establish subitizing capacity as a predictor of individual susceptibility to inattentional blindness under load.

Physical disability has affected many people's lives across the world. One of these disabilities that strongly affected some large category of people is visual lose. Blind people often face difficulties in moving around freely such as: in crossing the street, in reading, driving or socializing. They often rely on using certain aid devices to reach certain places or perform any other daily activities such as walking sticks. There are ongoing scientific researches in the area of rectifying blindness, but it has to go long way to achieve the solution. Also, there are research unleashes the ideas of assisting the blind people deficiency but lacks in technological aspects of implementation. This research project aims at helping blind people of all categories to achieve their day to day tasks easier through the use of a smart device. By using artificial intelligent and image processing, this smart device is able to detect faces, colors and deferent objects. The detection process is manifested by notifying the visually impaired person through either a sound alert or vibration. Additionally, this study presents a palpable survey that entails visually impaired people from the local community. Subsequently, the project uses both Open CV and Python for programming and implementation. The exertion of this project prototype investigates the algorithms which are used for detecting the objects. Also, it demonstrates how this smart device could detects certain physical object and how it could send a warning signal when faced by any obstacles. Overall, this research will be a positive addition in the world of health care sector by supporting blind people with the use of smart technology

When unexpected changes occur in a visual scene, people often fail to notice them. Because change detection depends on attentional mechanisms, people tend to notice changes that are of special significance. People with Williams syndrome (WMS) have an unusually strong interest in other people that is manifest in relatively spared face recognition skills, heightened social attention and hypersociability. We hypothesized that in a change blindness paradigm participants with WMS would be more sensitive to changes in people in social scenes compared to age, IQ and language matched participants with learning or intellectual disabilities. Two videos were presented, one showing an unexpected change to the identity of an actor and one with numerous unexpected changes during a conversation scene. Subjects in both the WMS and the learning disabilities groups noticed fewer overall changes than age-matched normal controls, suggesting that change detection is especially challenging to people with intellectual disabilities. Consistent with our hypothesis, WMS subjects noticed more person-related changes in the complex scene than did subjects with other intellectual/learning disabilities. WMS subjects attend to social elements of dynamic scenes, decreasing change blindness for changes associated with people.

In studies of change blindness, observers often have the phenomenological impression that the blindness is overcome all at once, so that change detection, localization and identification apparently occur together. Three experiments are described that explore dissociations between these processes using a discrete trial procedure in which 2 visual frames are presented sequentially with no intervening inter-frame-interval. The results reveal that change detection and localization are essentially perfect under these conditions regardless of the number of elements in the display, which is consistent with the idea that change detection and localization are mediated by pre-attentive parallel processes. In contrast, identification accuracy for an item before it changes is generally poor, and is heavily dependent on the number of items displayed. Identification accuracy after a change is substantially better, but depends on the new item's duration. This suggests that the change captures attention, which substantially enhances the likelihood of correctly identifying the new item. However, the results also reveal a limited capacity to identify unattended items. Specifically, we provide evidence that strongly suggests that, at least under these conditions, observers were able to identify two items without focused attention. Our results further suggest that spatial pre-cues that attract attention to an item before the change occurs simply ensure that the cued item is one of the two whose identity is encoded.

Culture is an influential predictor of the way people use their sensory (visual) perception to derive information through visual stimuli. The discipline of psychology is culturally-bounded, providing the dominant views of western societies, in relation to other cultural perspectives. This western bias in research is often termed cultural blindness. According to Nisbett’s model of cognition, individuals from Asian (collectivist) and Western (individualist) societies have bias to employ holistic and analytic visual processing styles, respectively. The stigma or negativity associated with Assistive Technology (AT) products are instigated by the societal perception of the communicative (semantics/meaning) content of those devices. There has been little empirical evidence that shows how individuals from different cultures interact with a given visual of an AT product, whether they are motivated to attend specific component (graphemes) of the product; and, the sequence of the fixation wit...

In this commentary we review evidence concerning the true sensitivity of viewers to visual changes in scene images. We argue that the data strongly suggest that "change blindness" experiments, while revealing of a variety of important constraints on encoding and retrieval processes in visual memory, do not demonstrate the lack of scene representations assumed by O&N. Instead, the data suggest that detailed scene representations can be generated and survive relatively intact across views (e.g., across saccades) and over extended periods of time. Of course, as we have known at least since the seminal work of Sperling (1960) and Averbach and Coriell (1961), these representations are not "iconic" in nature.

This paper looks at two puzzles raised by the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. First, how can we see at all if, in order to see, we must first perceptually attend to that which we see? Second, if attention is required for perception, why does it seem to us as if we are perceptually aware of the whole detailed visual field when it is quite clear that we do not attend to all that detail? We offer a general framework for thinking about perception and perceptual consciousness that addresses these questions and we propose, in addition, an informal account of the relation between attention and consciousness. On this view, perceptual awareness is a species of attention.

In this commentary we review evidence concerning the true sensitivity of viewers to visual changes in scene images. We argue that the data strongly suggest that "change blindness" experiments, while revealing of a variety of important constraints on encoding and retrieval processes in visual memory, do not demonstrate the lack of scene representations assumed by O&N. Instead, the data suggest that detailed scene representations can be generated and survive relatively intact across views (e.g., across saccades) and over extended periods of time. Of course, as we have known at least since the seminal work of Sperling (1960) and Averbach and Coriell (1961), these representations are not "iconic" in nature.

This paper investigates a new species ofskeptical reasoning about visual experience that takesits start from developments in perceptual science(especially recent work on change blindness andinattentional blindness). According to thisskepticism, the impression of visual awareness of theenvironment in full detail and high resolution isillusory. I argue that the new skepticism depends onmisguided assumptions about the character ofperceptual experience, about whether perceptualexperiences

Experiments on scene perception and change blindness suggest that the visual system does not construct detailed internal models of a scene. These experiments therefore call into doubt the traditional view that vision is a process in which detailed representations of the environment must be constructed. The non-existence of such detailed representations, however, does not entail that we do not perceive the detailed environment. The "grand illusion hypothesis" that our visual world is an illusion rests on (1) a problematic "reconstructionist" conception of vision, and (2) a misconception about the character of perceptual experience.

In a recent opinion article, Simons and Rensink [1] argue that change blindness (CB) is logically compatible with the existence of detailed internal representations underlying visual experience. They criticize O'Regan and Noë [2] for assuming, fallaciously as they say, that CB demonstrates conclusively that there are no internal representations. This misrepresents our approach, but also raises important issues and calls for a response.

Background/Objective: Self-confidence is an attitude often associated with repeated experiences and with the realistic perception of individual weaknesses and strengths. It is not the same as competence but, with a view to a safe and timely intervention in the emergency context, it is necessary that nurses feel confident in their ability to intervene appropriately. In the context of simulation, the students' self-confidence is an important outcome that needs to be evaluated. Objective: To evaluate the effect of theoretical and simulation classes on the nursing students' self-confidence. Methods: Quasi-experimental study, without control group, with evaluation at three moments: before the classes, after the theoretical classes (40 hours) and after the simulation classes (25 hours). Questionnaires with the Portuguese version of the Self-confidence Scale were applied to 59 nursing students in two courses, in 2011 (25 students) and 2012 (34 students). All the students were taking the third year of the nursing undergraduate program. Formal and ethical principles were followed. Results: The mean global self-confidence score corresponded to 2.35 on the first evaluation, increasing to 3.07 on the second and 3.34 on the third. The t-test reveals that these differences are highly significant (p < .001). The individual analysis of each dimension (neurological, breathing and circulation) reveals similar and statistically highly significant improvements. Conclusions: The classes were effective to improve the level of self-confidence. Simulated practice is a good strategy to improve the confidence to intervene in an emergency situation.

What are the neural correlates of conscious visual awareness? Tackling this question requires contrasting neural correlates of stimulus processing culminating in visual awareness with neural correlates of stimulus processing unaccompanied by awareness. To produce these two neural states, one must be able to erase an otherwise visible stimulus from awareness. This article describes and assesses visual phenomena involving dissociation of physical stimulation and conscious awareness: degraded stimulation, visual masking, visual crowding, bistable figures, binocular rivalry, motioninduced blindness, inattentional blindness, change blindness and attentional blink. No single approach stands above the others, but those producing changing visual awareness despite invariant physical stimulation are clearly preferable. Such phenomena can help lead us ultimately to a comprehensive account of the neural correlates of conscious awareness.

Glaucoma is the most common cause of blindness in the world, and it is known as the silent thief of vision because it can sneak up on any patient. However, the loss of vision from Glaucoma is preventable. Glaucoma is caused by the gradual increase of pressure in the eye which is known as Intraocular Pressure (IOP). While the pressure increases in the eye, different parts of the eye become affected until the eye parts are damaged. The eye vessels' sizes are so small that they easily become affected. Moreover, the pressure inside the eye pushes the lens affecting the size of the Pupil. Also, the pressure in the eye presses the optic nerve in the back of the eye causing damage to the nerve fibers. Over 90% of Glaucoma cases have no signs or symptoms because peripheral vision can be lost before a person's central vision is affected. The only way to prevent Glaucoma is by early detection. This research study calculates three features from the frontal eye image that can be used to assess the risk of Glaucoma. These features include redness of the sclera, red area percentage, and the Pupil size. The database used in this work contains 100 facial images that have been divided into 50 healthy cases and 50 non-healthy cases with high eye pressure. Once the features were extracted, a neural network classification is applied to obtain the status of the patients in terms of eye pressure.

Objective: This study aimed to prospectively assess self-rated sleep length and sleep quality in recreational MDMA users (n= 18, 13 male, 5 female, 19.5 yrs) for the 7 days following ecstasy consumption, and to compare them to alcohol drinking controls (n= 18, 7 male, 11 female, 20.2 yrs).

Inattentional blindness, the act of failing to notice clearly visible, salient objects in one's environment when engaged in a task, is of great interest due to both its commonality and its overall applications. This study attempted to objectively support previous claims made about the inattentional blindness phenomenon using eye tracking data. It was found that even when a stimulus crossed the fovea, not all individuals saw it. It was also discovered that some participants managed to notice the stimulus without fixating on it, in direct opposition to a hypothesis stating that fixation was required to notice a stimulus.

Developmental dyslexia, a specific learning difficulty in reading, manifests as effortful decoding of words and as such is commonly associated with reduced phonemic awareness. However, its underlying cause remains elusive, with magnocellular visual processing, temporal auditory processing, visual attentional deficits and cerebellar dysfunction all gaining some traction. More recent theories have 25/7/19

Automated driving changes the role of the driver from an active operator towards a supervisor during partially automated driving and passenger in the highly automated driving mode. To foster successful interaction between humans and automated systems, feedback on automation stages and behaviors is considered a key factor. The present study used a two-step procedure to investigate drivers' information needs during partially and highly automated driving in comparison to manual driving for highway scenarios. The first step consisted in an expert focus group on expected information needs. Results showed that independent from specific scenarios, information should provide transparency, comprehensibility, and predictability of system actions. This includes the current system status, the remaining time to a change in the level of automation, the fallback level as well as reasons and a preview for ongoing and subsequent maneuvers. In the second step, results from the expert focus group were used to set up a driving simulator study. A sample of 20 participants performed three highway trips on the same route either in the manual, partially automated (hands-on, permanent monitoring, no secondary task) as well as highly automated condition (cloze test on a laptop as secondary task). Questionnaires and interviews about information needs were applied after each trip and glance behavior was analyzed. Information needs showed great variance between the drivers, which can mainly be explained by trust in automation. Partially automated driving was considered more exhausting than the other conditions due to the continuous supervision task. Information needs for the automated conditions were primarily related to the supervision of the system, whereas requested information during manual driving was centered on performing the current driving task. Glance data supported these patterns: during partially automated driving, drivers showed most and longer control glances at the mirrors and instrument cluster. Secondary task engagement during highly automated driving varied in dependence of trust in automation and the perceived complexity of the situation. However, less salient objects in a situation, such as traffic signs, were not perceived and no control glances were performed. It can be concluded that information needs change for partially and highly automated driving. Requested information is primarily focused on the status, transparency and comprehensibility of system action in contrast to driving-task related information during manual driving. These changes need to be considered in the human-machine-interface (HMI) design for automated driving.

The goal of this work is to provide evidence for the cognitive objectification of sexualized targets via a change blindness paradigm. Since sexual objectification involves a fragmented perception of the target in which individuating features (i.e., the face) have less information potential than sexualized features (i.e., body parts), we hypothesized that changes in faces of sexualized targets would be detected with less accuracy than changes in faces of nonsexualized targets. Conversely, we expected that changes in body parts would be detected with higher accuracy for sexualized than nonsexualized targets. These hypotheses were supported by the results of two studies that employed a change blindness task in which stimuli with changes both to faces and bodies of sexualized and nonsexualized images were presented. Unexpectedly, the hypothesized effects emerged both for female and male targets.

Change blindness refers to the difficulty most people find in detecting a difference between two pictures when these are presented successively, with a brief interruption between. Attention at the site of the change is required for detection. A number of studies have investigated change blindness in adults and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Some have produced evidence that people with ASD find changes to social stimuli harder to detect and changes to non‐social stimuli easier to detect, relative to comparison participants. However, other studies have produced entirely contradictory findings. There is a need for consistency in methodology to aid understanding of change blindness and attentional processes in ASD. Here, we replicate a change blindness study previously carried out with typically developing (TD) children and adults and with adults with ASD. Results reveal attenuated change blindness for non‐social stimuli in children with ASD relative to TD norms. Our res...

When brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced: The changes become extremely difficult to notice, even when they are large, presented repeatedly, and the observer expects them to occur (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). To determine the mechanisms behind this induced "change blindness", four experiments examine its dependence on initial preview and on the nature of the interruptions used. Results support the proposal that representations at the early stages of visual processing are inherently volatile, and that focused attention is needed to stabilize them sufficiently to support the perception of change. Over the past few decades, evidence has been accumulating that-contrary to our subjective impressions-we do not have a coherent and detailed representation of the coherent and detailed world that surrounds us.

According to reductive intentionalism, the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is constituted by the experience's intentional (or representational) content. In this article I attempt to show that a phenomenon in visual perception called change blindness poses a problem for this doctrine. Specifically, I argue that phenomenal character is not sensitive, as it should be if reductive intentionalism is correct, to fine-grained variations in content. The standard antiintentionalist strategy is to adduce putative cases in which phenomenal character varies despite sameness of content. This paper explores an alternative antiintentionalist tack, arguing, by way of a specific example involving change blindness, that content can vary despite sameness of phenomenal character.

Culture is an influential predictor of the way people use their sensory (visual) perception to derive information through visual stimuli. The discipline of psychology is culturally-bounded, providing the dominant views of western societies, in relation to other cultural perspectives. This western bias in research is often termed cultural blindness. According to Nisbett’s model of cognition, individuals from Asian (collectivist) and Western (individualist) societies have bias to employ holistic and analytic visual processing styles, respectively. The stigma or negativity associated with Assistive Technology (AT) products are instigated by the societal perception of the communicative (semantics/meaning) content of those devices. There has been little empirical evidence that shows how individuals from different cultures interact with a given visual of an AT product, whether they are motivated to attend specific component (graphemes) of the product; and, the sequence of the fixation wit...

Figure 1: (a) Mise-Unseen uses eye-tracking in VR headsets to hide changes that occur inside the user's field of view by applying them outside the user's fovea. Mise-Unseen unnoticeably changes the scene as the user is focusing elsewhere (circle): (b) cross-facing pieces together (arrow) to help the user solve this puzzle, (c) swapping the gallery painting to adapt to the user's detected interest in modern art, (d) hiding the low fidelity of this "explosion", (e) matching the virtual axe's position to the haptic prop following the detected user interest, (f) shifting storage racks while walking to adapt to a lack of physical space, (g) reducing motion sickness during teleportation by blending static images outside the fovea, and (h) updating hints to prevent the user from solving this riddle too quickly.

While it has been suggested that diagonal rhythmical bilateral movements promote improvement in motor and cognitive functions, no study that we are aware of has actually examined electrophysiological changes during diagonal movements. Therefore, we aimed to study cerebral activity during the performance of diagonal and vertical movements (DM and VM, respectively), through EEG recording focusing on theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands. Following independent component analysis, we computed time-frequency and source localization analysis. We found that (1) increased frontal theta during the initiation of DM was possibly related to the computational effort; (2) a biphasic pattern of frontoparietal alpha/beta modulations was found during VM; and in addition, (3) source localization showed increased frontal theta during DM generated in the middle frontal cortex. We will discuss the current results and their implications in relation to task difficulty, spatial and temporal computation.

Neural plasticity, the ability of neural tissue to adapt to a number of environments, is considered a defining characteristic of the brain. However, plasticity is poorly understood at the systems level. The exact limits of neural plasticity, which areas can adapt and what functions they can perform, have not been well described in the literature. The study of deaf individuals represents a unique window into this phenomenon. Areas of the brain that are considered part of auditory cortex in a hearing person are still present in deaf individuals. Which functions these areas of cortex can perform in a deaf person, and which they cannot, may help us to understand the limits of plasticity in these tissues. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on neurological and behavioral changes in the deaf as it pertains to visual processing. Chapter 2 describes an optical imaging study, which used a peripheral visual attention task and fast optical imaging to examine changes in the auditory cortex of deaf individuals. Chapter 3 describes event-related potential (ERP) data on changes in an auditory ERP and attention-related components. Finally, Chapter 4 reviews the findings described above and proposes future directions for this research.

The reported experiments aimed to investigate whether a person and their gaze direction presented in the context of a naturalistic scene cause perception, memory and attention to be biased in typically developing adolescents and high-functioning adolescents with ASD. A novel computerized image manipulation program presented a series of photographic scenes, each containing a person. The program enabled participants to laterally maneuver the scenes behind a static window, the borders of which partially occluded the scenes. The gaze direction of the person in the scenes spontaneously cued attention of both groups in the direction of gaze, affecting judgments of preference (Experiment 1a) and causing memory biases (Experiment 1b). Experiment 2 showed that the gaze direction of a person cues visual search accurately to the exact location of gaze in both groups. These findings suggest that biases in preference, memory and attention are caused by another person's gaze direction when viewed in a complex scene in adolescents with and without ASD.

We compared conscious and nonconscious processing of briefly flashed words using a visual masking procedure while recording intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) in ten patients. Nonconscious processing of masked words was observed in multiple cortical areas, mostly within an early time window (,300 ms), accompanied by induced gammaband activity, but without coherent long-distance neural activity, suggesting a quickly dissipating feedforward wave. In contrast, conscious processing of unmasked words was characterized by the convergence of four distinct neurophysiological markers: sustained voltage changes, particularly in prefrontal cortex, large increases in spectral power in the gamma band, increases in long-distance phase synchrony in the beta range, and increases in long-range Granger causality. We argue that all of those measures provide distinct windows into the same distributed state of conscious processing. These results have a direct impact on current theoretical discussions concerning the neural correlates of conscious access.

People often fail to detect a change between two visual scenes, a phenomenon referred to as change blindness. This study investigates how a post-change object's similarity to the pre-change object influences memory of the pre-change object and affects change detection. The results of Experiment 1 showed that similarity lowered detection sensitivity but did not affect the speed of identifying the pre-change object, suggesting that similarity between the pre-and post-change objects does not degrade the pre-change representation. Identification speed for the pre-change object was faster than naming the new object regardless of detection accuracy. Similarity also decreased detection sensitivity in Experiment 2 but improved the recognition of the pre-change object under both correct detection and detection failure. The similarity effect on recognition was greatly reduced when 20% of each pre-change stimulus was masked by random dots in Experiment 3. Together the results suggest that the level of pre-change representation under detection failure is equivalent to the level under correct detection and that the pre-change representation is almost complete. Similarity lowers detection sensitivity but improves explicit access in recognition. Dissociation arises between recognition and change detection as the two judgments rely on the match-to-mismatch signal and mismatch-to-match signal, respectively.

What is the relationship between attention and conscious awareness? Awareness sometimes appears to be restricted to the contents of focused attention, yet at other times irrelevant distractors will dominate awareness. This contradictory relationship has also been reflected in an abundance of discrepant research findings leading to an enduring controversy in cognitive psychology. Lavie&#39;s load theory of attention suggests that the puzzle can be solved by considering the role of perceptual load. Although distractors will intrude upon awareness in conditions of low load, awareness will be restricted to the content of focused attention when the attended information involves high perceptual load. Here, we review recent evidence for this proposal with an emphasis on the various subjective blindness phenomena, and their neural correlates, induced by conditions of high perceptual load. We also present novel findings that clarify the role of attention in the response to stimulus contrast....