The present study examines the effect of background surfaces that vary in depth on change detection performance. Increasing experimental evidence shows that background surfaces, especially ground planes, have a special role in organizing the layout of objects in 3-D scenes. The role of the ground surface in determining the perceived distance of objects was a major component of Alhazen's (ca. 1038/
1989) theory of depth perception. Gibson (
1950) also emphasized the role of ground planes in the perception of the visual world. He proposed that the visual system uses ground planes as a foundation for organizing information in 3-D scenes. Recent studies of the importance of ground surfaces in the perception of the external world have examined the role of mediated contact relations for objects not in direct contact with the ground (Meng & Sedgwick,
2001,
2002) and the effect of surface continuity (Feria, Braunstein, & Andersen,
2003; Sinai, Ooi, & He,
1998). Other studies suggested that between the neural systems and the higher level perceptual functions there is an intermediate surface representation layer (Nakayama, He, & Shimojo,
1995), which integrates low level visual information with higher level functions. Visual search (He & Nakayama,
1992), motion perception (He & Nakayama,
1994a), visual texture segregation (He & Nakayama,
1994b), depth perception from binocular disparity (He & Ooi,
2000), and perception of subjective contours (Gillam & Nakayama,
2002) have been found to be affected by this intermediate level of surface representation.