Abstract
Previous research has shown that inverting and negating scenes can affect recognition memory for pictures.
Our research focuses on the effects of inversion and negation on the ability to detect changes in scenes. Subjects were shown two successive presentations of a scene, separated by a blank interval. The subjects' task was to determine whether any object in the scene changed between the two presentations. Scenes were presented in one of four formats: normal, inverted, negated, or both inverted and negated. When the initial preview time was 500 msec, inverting and/or negating scenes significantly reduced subjects' change detection accuracy as compared to normal format presentation. Accuracy levels for scenes that were inverted, negated, or both inverted and negated were not significantly different. Errors were the result of either failing to detect any change in the scene, or of misidentifying the object that changed. Overall, 58% of errors were due to failure to detect the change and 42% were due to object misidentification. Scenes which were negatedresulted in the highest percentage of misidentified objects, suggesting that negation interfered more with object identification than any of the other transformations. The effects of inversion and negation were a function of the amount of time the subject had to view the initial scene — when the initial preview time was increased to 1500 msec, all effects of inversion and negation were eliminated. Future experiments will investigate the influence of presentation time in further detail.