Abstract
BackgroundChange blindness refers to a failure to detect changes between consecutively presented images separated by, for example, a brief blank screen. As an explanation of change blindness, it has been suggested that our representations of the environment are sparse outside focal attention and even that changed features may not be represented at all. In order to find electrophysiological evidence of neural representations of changed features during change blindness, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in adults in an oddball variant of the change blindness flicker paradigm.MethodsERPs were recorded when subjects performed a change detection task in which the modified images were infrequently interspersed (p = .2) among the frequently (p = .8) presented unmodified images. Responses to modified and unmodified images were compared in the time window of 60-100 ms after stimulus onset.ResultsERPs to infrequent modified images were found to differ in amplitude from those to frequent unmodified images at the midline electrodes (Fz, Pz, Cz and Oz) at the latency of 60-100 ms even when subjects were unaware of changes (change blindness).ConclusionsThe results suggest that the brain registers changes very rapidly, and that changed features in images are neurally represented even without participants' ability to report them.
Highlights
Change blindness refers to a failure to detect changes between consecutively presented images separated by, for example, a brief blank screen
Any brain response elicited by changed features during change blindness would count as counter-evidence to the no-representation account [1,4]
Evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs) of implicit change detection was provided in a study by Fernandez-Duque et al [7], in which a continuous flicker paradigm was used
Summary
Change blindness refers to a failure to detect changes between consecutively presented images separated by, for example, a brief blank screen. Responses to modified and unmodified images were not compared to each other, but instead unmodified pictures in these two conditions For this reason it is possible that the result reflected implicit processing of the presence of changes, but not directly implicit responses to changed features in stimuli. In another ERP-study, Eimer & Mazza ([10], see [13]) investigated brain responses to noticed and unnoticed changes using the S1-S2, or “one-shot”, flicker paradigm in which the changes occur in S2. They suspected that subjects’ preparation to the task was systematically worse in change blindness trials than in trials in which participants correctly reported the absence of change
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