Eye movements dissociate between perceiving, sensing, and unconscious change detection in scenes.

Abstract

Detecting visual changes can be based on perceiving, whereby one can identify a specific detail that has changed, on sensing, whereby one knows that there is a change but is unable to identify what changed, or on unconscious change detection, whereby one is unaware of any change even though the change influences one's behavior. Prior work has indicated that the processes underlying these different types of change detection are functionally and neurally distinct, but the attentional mechanisms that are related to these different types of change detection remain largely unknown. In the current experiment, we examined eye movements during a change detection task in globally manipulated scenes, and participants indicated their change detection confidence on a scale that allowed us to isolate perceiving, sensing, and unconscious change detection. For perceiving-based change detection, but not sensing-based or unconscious change detection, participants were more likely to preferentially revisit highly changed scene regions across the first and second presentation of the scene (i.e., resampling). This increase in resampling started within 250 ms of the test scene onset, suggesting that the effect began within the first two fixations. In addition, changed scenes were related to more clustered (i.e., less dispersed) eye movements than unchanged scenes, particularly when the subjects were highly confident that no change had occurred - providing evidence for change detection outside of conscious awareness. The results indicate that perceiving, sensing, and unconscious change detection responses are related to partially distinct patterns of eye movements.