Abstract
Although we experience the visual world as a continuous, richly detailed space we often fail to notice large and significant changes. Such change blindness has been demonstrated for local object changes and changes to the visual form of whole images, however it is assumed that total changes from one image to another would be easily detected. Film editing presents such total changes several times a minute yet we rarely seem to be aware of them, a phenomenon we refer to here as edit blindness. This phenomenon has never been empirically demonstrated even though film editors believe they have at their disposal techniques that induce edit blindness, the Continuity Editing Rules. In the present study we tested the relationship between Continuity Editing Rules and edit blindness by instructing participants to detect edits while watching excerpts from feature films. Eye movements were recorded during the task. The results indicate that edits constructed according to the Continuity Editing Rules result in greater edit blindness than edits not adhering to the rules. A quarter of edits joining two viewpoints of the same scene were undetected and this increased to a third when the edit coincided with a sudden onset of motion. Some cuts may be missed due to suppression of the cut transients by coinciding with eyeblinks or saccadic eye movements but the majority seem to be due to inattentional blindness as viewers attend to the depicted narrative. In conclusion, this study presents the first empirical evidence of edit blindness and its relationship to natural attentional behaviour during dynamic scene viewing.
Highlights
Our experience of the visual world as a rich, highly detailed and continuous space is an illusion constructed from a series of momentary snapshots encoded while the eyes are still and stitched together across periods of blindness as the eyes move
Change Blindness occurs when a visual change is masked by an artificial occlusion (Simons, 1996; Levin & Simons, 1997; Rensink et al, 1997; Simons & Levin, 1998; O’Regan et al, 1999; Rensink et al, 2000) or natural period of perceptual insensitivity, such as a saccadic eye movement or eye blink (Carlson-Radvansky & Irwin, 1995; Grimes, 1996; Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999; O’Regan et al, 2000), and participants fail to compare the changed scene to their memory of the scene (Brockmole & Henderson, 2005; Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002; Mitroff, Simons, & Levin, 2004)
In order to minimise confounds of shot content the cuts used in the analysis had to be cuts to shots of size Close-Up (CU), Close Medium Shot (CMS), or Medium Shot (MS)
Summary
Our experience of the visual world as a rich, highly detailed and continuous space is an illusion constructed from a series of momentary snapshots encoded while the eyes are still (fixations) and stitched together across periods of blindness as the eyes move (saccadic eye movements) (see Henderson, 2003, for summary). M. (2008) Edit Blindness retained across saccades and over time (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999; Hollingworth et al, 2001; Melcher, 2001; Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002; Tatler, Gilchrist, & Land, 2005; Hollingworth, 2006; see Võ, Schneider, & Matthias, and Humphrey & Underwood in this volume) but changes to this information do not reach the level of awareness unless the change violates critical expectations about the continuity of the scene and objects within it (Levin & Simons, 2000). Small local changes to object features (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999; Hollingworth et al, 2001; Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002) and even slight global changes to the visual form of an entire scene (Henderson & Hollingworth, 2003a; Hollingworth & Henderson, 2004; Henderson, Brockmole, & Gajewski, 2008) have been shown to sometimes go undetected, but it is assumed that a total change from one visual scene to a completely different visual scene that is not obscured in any way, e.g. by a mask, would be guaranteed to be detected
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