Abstract
Observers often have difficulty detecting visual changes when they are presented during a disruption, an experience known as change blindness. Successful change detection requires not only focused attention and encoding, but also a comparison process to detect the difference between pre and post presentations of the stimulus. As such, working memory may be an important component in this process. Previous research suggests different systems within working memory may differentially affect visual search for a target. Visual search performance is detrimentally affected by filling spatial working memory. However, performance remains successful when an object based working memory task is used. The current research investigated the effect of object and spatial working memory on change detection performance using a flicker paradigm. Previous work from our lab suggests that filling object based working memory has little effect on change detection performance for color changes. The present experiments examined object and spatial working memory and change detection using a dual task design. In Experiment 1, observers complete an object based working memory task and a change detection task both in isolation and concurrently. In Experiment 2 observers complete a spatial working memory task and a change detection task both in isolation and concurrently. In the working memory task observers first see an array of 4 squares (all different colors in the object working memory experiment and all black in the spatial working memory experiment). Then they see a square in isolation and have to determine whether that color or spatial location was in the original display. The flicker change detection task used naturalistic scenes that contained either a change to the color or location of one object in the scene. If similar processes underlie visual search and change detection, we expect object based and spatial working memory to differentially affect change detection performance.