Abstract
Our ability to form predictions about the behavior of objects outside our focus of attention and to recognize when those expectations have been violated is critical to our survival. One principle that greatly influences our beliefs about unattended stimuli is that of constancy, or the tendency to assume objects outside our attention have remained constant, and the next time we attend to them they will be unchanged. Although this phenomenon is familiar from research on inattentional blindness, it is currently unclear when constancy is assumed and what conditions are adequate to convince us that unattended stimuli have likely undergone a change while outside of our attentional spotlight. Using a simple change-detection task, we sought to show that unattended stimuli are strongly predisposed to be perceived as unchanging when presented on constant, unchanging backgrounds; however, when stimuli were presented with significant incidental visual activity, participants were no longer biased towards change rejection. We found that participants were far more likely to report that a change had occurred if target presentation was accompanied by salient, incidental visual activity. We take these results to indicate that when an object is not represented in working memory, we use environmental conditions to judge whether or not these items are likely to have undergone a change or remained constant.
Highlights
When we gaze upon a scene, our brain immediately goes about arranging the flood of visual information into coherent objects in space (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)
The process of moving from unrefined feature information to complete perceptual objects is the central question of Feature Integration Theory, and, as remarkable a feat as this quick and automatic process is, perhaps impressive is our rapid identification of what information is important for our immediate goals, and the subsequent direction of attention towards a subset of this visual information while relegating the remaining majority of our visual environment to a fallow inattentional state (Treisman, 2006)
At any moment we are ignoring a large portion of our visual environment, attention is not a prerequisite for perception (Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007), and the information we ignore does not disappear from our vision
Summary
At any moment we are ignoring a large portion of our visual environment, attention is not a prerequisite for perception (Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007), and the information we ignore does not disappear from our vision Instead, this unattended visual information must still be processed and arranged into coherent objects in a systematic and rule-based way (Braun & Sagi, 1990; Rosenholtz et al, 2012; Treisman & Gelade, 1980). Researchers have paid relatively less attention to inattentional visual processes than to the principles governing objects within our
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