Abstract
Recent research has demonstrated that people often fail to detect between-view changes in their visual environment. This phenomenon, called “change blindness” (CB) occurs whenever the perceptual transient that usually accompanies a change is somehow blocked, or made less salient. For example, in the well-known flicker paradigm, the transient is blocked by inserting a blank screen between the original and changed scenes. The present experiments tested whether transients that do not involve the appearance or disappearance of visual objects would also produce CB. Therefore we tested whether the appearance or disappearance of color information, and increments or decrements in luminance can cause CB. In three experiments, subjects searched for changes in natural scenes in a one-shot change paradigm (with some trials utilizing the flicker paradigm, and others without). We found that both color transients and luminance transients significantly reduced change detection (by approximately 30%) relative to a no-transient condition.