Development and validation of implicit behavioral tests assessing perceptual sensitivity to construction hazards.

ABSTRACTThe positive impact of physical activity on cognitive functions is well established and varies by exercise type, with open‐skill sports—activities involving high uncertainty—offering distinct advantages. Although team sports are traditionally considered open‐skill activities, parkour provides a dynamic and varied environment. This study compared the effects of indoor team sports (consistent environment) and parkour (varied environments) on cognitive functions. Forty healthy young adults (mean age: 21.5 ± 3 years) were divided into a team sports group (TS, n = 19) and a parkour group (PK, n = 21). Both groups trained twice a week for 4 weeks, with sessions lasting 2 hours each. Cognitive performance was assessed pre‐ and posttraining using the Trail Making Test (TMT), Letter Cancellation Test (LCT), Change Blindness Test (CB), visual memory tests, and short‐ and long‐term memory recall. The PK group significantly improved in TMT and CB tests (p < 0.001), whereas the TS group showed no significant changes (p > 0.05). Both groups improved similarly in the LCT and working memory tests (p < 0.001). However, the PK group outperformed the TS group in long‐term memory tasks (p < 0.001). These findings suggest that parkour's exploratory nature enhances observation skills, visuospatial attention, and long‐term memory more effectively than indoor team sports. Training in diverse environments appears to yield greater benefits for visual and cognitive capacities than practice in static settings.

A cross-cultural comparison of change detection in driving and non-driving scenes.

Slow change blindness, when attentive observers fail to notice large changes that happen gradually, raises questions about how visual information is combined across time. One plausible integration strategy is serial dependence: blending information from the recent past into current perception. Here, we investigate serial dependencies in perception of a cartoon object that slowly changes hue. In a one-shot experiment, observers each viewed a single trial with a random degree of hue change and provided one hue judgement response. Across participants, the entire morph was probed. Observers’ hue reports revealed an overall bias towards the past that increased in magnitude as more of the morph was experienced. In three follow-up experiments, we verified that observers experienced slow change blindness, confirmed that the bias was serial dependence, and replicated the results with a repeated-trials design. Overall, we provide evidence that serial dependence actively biases perception during gradual changes, producing slow change blindness.TeaserBy strategically integrating recent and current visual information, observers experience a slowly changing stimulus as stable.

Change blindness, subset segmentation, and the perceptual underestimation of subset numerosity.

Change Blindness: The Impact of Motion and Perceptual Load

Cinema remains a cornerstone of mass entertainment, consistently drawing large audiences. In Russia's entertainment landscape, cinema tickets rank second only to theatre and concert tickets, surpassing shows, museums, and sporting events in 2024. A Mediascope study from January to July 2024 reveals that films and TV shows dominate television viewing, accounting for 40% of all content watched by viewers aged four and older at home or in cottages. The allure of cinema partly stems from the unique ability to safely experience events that are impossible in real life. However, the psychological reasons behind our fascination with moving images on the screen are seldom explored through cognitive-communicative theories. This paper delves into the cognitive aspects that make cinema a compelling form of mass media. It identifies five phenomena contributing to cinema's realism: , "change blindness", "mirror image rule", "intersubject correlation", and "theory of mind". These phenomena help explain cinema's regulatory and recreational functions and its profound emotional impact. Moreover, cognitive insights reinforce the notion that cinema, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, is a "hot" medium — one that fosters complete immersion in the presented information. By examining these cognitive factors, we gain a deeper understanding of cinema's enduring appeal and its place within the broader media landscape.

This paper introduces a novel digital biomarker based on eye tracking data, the Conscious Perception Index (CPI), designed to measure conscious perception by leveraging established eye gaze metrics. The CPI builds upon foundational eye-tracking markers, including saccades and fixation statistics, coefficient K, and cognitive load, to provide a continuous, quantified computation of perceptual awareness in real time. To evaluate CPI's effectiveness, a change blindness study was conducted in a VR setting, allowing the analysis of conscious perception within an explicit interaction context. Findings demonstrate that the CPI provides a reliable measure of conscious engagement, with significant results in statistical analysis supporting its robustness. Classification via LogisticRegression is able to separate conscious interaction from observational behavior with an accuracy of 83.3%. This research underscores CPI's potential to enhance eye-tracking applications in cognitive science and human-computer interaction, opening new avenues for measuring perceptual awareness and refining interactive technologies based on user perception.

The present study aims to investigate the level of change blindness among university students. The sample consisted of 400 male and female students from the University of Baghdad across various academic disciplines. A change blindness test was administered to the participants. The results revealed the presence of change blindness among the students, with no statistically significant differences observed between males and females or between students of scientific and humanities disciplines.

The findings on the effect of autistic traits on face recognition performance vary across previous studies. Even though people with higher autistic traits have difficulties identifying faces, the extent to which they have difficulties is unknown. Moreover, even though Autism Spectrum Disorder has sex differences in prevalence and symptoms, a limited number of studies consider sex differences in face recognition. The present study examined the relationship between face-change discrimination sensitivity and autistic traits considering sex differences. The participants included 82 females and 88 males in the general population. Face change blindness task using psychophysical method was used to evaluate the degree of sensitivity to faces in each participant. A psychometric function computed the Point of Subjective Equality (PSE) as the morphing level required to discriminate between faces. The Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) was also administered to participants. The results revealed a negative relationship between the total score of the AQ and the PSE in females but not males. This study suggests that sex differences should be considered when examining the relationship between autistic traits and other-face perception.

How viewers interpret different pictorial projections has been a longstanding question affecting many disciplines, including psychology, art, computer science, and vision science. The most-prominent theories assume that viewers interpret pictures according to a single linear perspective projection. Yet, no existing theory accurately describes viewers’ perceptions across the wide variety of projections used throughout art history. Recently, Hertzmann hypothesized that pictorial 3D shape perception is interpreted according to a separate linear perspective for each eye fixation in a picture. We performed four experiments based on this hypothesis. The first two experiments found that viewers consider object depictions as more accurate when an object is projected according to its own local linear projection, rather than one consistent with the rest of the picture. In the third experiment, viewers exhibited change blindness to projections in peripheral vision, suggesting that perception of shape primarily occurs around fixations. The fourth experiment found surface slant compensation to be dependent on fixation. We conclude that pictorial shape perception operates according to per-fixation perspective.

Variables influencing change blindness in construction safety

A recent discovery documented robust and reliable individual differences in how quickly people become aware of non-conscious visual stimuli (Sklar, Goldstein, et al., 2021). Given the seemingly large role that conscious experiences play in our lives, this trait is likely to be associated with later cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. Here we examine the possible implications of this trait to perceptual conscious experiences. In two experiments we demonstrate that the speed of prioritization to awareness is correlated with the ability to notice changes in a change blindness paradigm. The first experiment (N = 97) found a correlation between prioritization speed and multiple parameters of change blindness performance. The second, preregistered, replication experiment (N = 99), further demonstrated that variability in other perceptual-decision making tasks cannot account for this correlation. The results of both experiments suggest that prioritization speed is tightly related with conscious experiences in other situations.

While vibrotactile displays continue to gain popularity, it remains that the phenomenon of tactile change blindness negatively impacts the human ability to detect changes between and within tactile signals. This paper surveys the research literature on tactile change detection and blindness under various parameters, including the number of tactors used, the intensity and length of the stimulus, and whether distractors between stimuli (i.e., transients) were used during experimentation, among others. The goal of this survey is to summarize what has been done in an attempt to better understand the parameters that exacerbate tactile change blindness and identify potential areas of future research. When such an understanding is reached, the design of haptic and multimodal displays may ideally be improved.

The similarities between 2D summary statistics and fragmentary 3D vision suggest common principles. Specifically, both 2D and 3D visual processing discard information whenever that information is redundant or inessential for ecologically valid vision in a consistent world. Change blindness and other illusions result from information loss without awareness, when the corresponding consistency assumptions are violated.

Change detection (CD) is critical in everyday tasks. While current algorithmic approaches for CD are improving, they remain imprecise, often requiring human intervention. Cognitive science research focuses on understanding CD mechanisms, especially through change blindness studies. However, these do not address the primary requirement in real-life CD - detecting changes as effectively as possible. Such a requirement is directly relevant to the visual comparison field - studying visualisation techniques to compare data and identify differences or changes effectively. Recent studies have used Virtual Reality (VR) to improve visual comparison by providing an immersive platform where users can interact with 3D data at a real-life scale, enhancing spatial reasoning. We believe VR could also improve CD performance accordingly. Particularly, VR offers stereoscopic depth perception over traditional displays, potentially enhancing the detection of spatial change. In this paper, we develop and analyse three 3D visual comparison techniques for CD in VR: Sliding Window, 3D Slider, and Switch Back. These techniques are evaluated under synthetic but realistic environments and frequently occurring Perceptual Challenges, including different Changed Object Size, Lighting Variation, and Scene Drift conditions. Experimental results reveal significant differences between the techniques in detection time measures and subjective user experience.

The failure to notice changes to objects is called change blindness, and it is often studied with the flicker task. Observers performing this task see two rapidly alternating but slightly different stimulus displays that are usually photos of real-world scenes. In order to detect the change, they must compare objects in the pre-change scene with objects at the same locations in the post-change scene to determine whether they are the same or different. It has been proposed that change blindness can occur when the memory representation of a pre-change object is incomplete and thereby impairs the same/different comparison with the post-change object at the same location. It has also been proposed that even with intact pre-change object memory representations, failure of same/different comparisons for other reasons can cause change blindness. The goal of the current study was to conduct flicker task experiments to examine both proposals. We conducted the current experiments with non-photographic stimuli, varied the degree of feature-based change of colored lines and found that the greater degree of change, the faster the same/different comparisons, and the faster that changes were detected. We also examined the representation integrity account of change blindness by comparing detection times of target objects that underwent a single feature change with those that underwent multiple sequential feature changes. The latter were detected faster, which suggests that multiple identities of these sequentially changing objects were stored in memory and facilitated change detection. In another experiment we found that objects that underwent multiple sequential feature changes were not detected as fast as those that underwent multiple simultaneous feature changes. This is consistent with the representation account of change blindness and suggests that memories of multiple sequentially changing object identities are transient and may become less complete over time. And more generally that multiple simultaneous and multiple sequential feature-based changes to these stimuli can show the extent to which memory is involved when searching for flicker task targets. The results of the current study indicate that both the comparison failure and the representation integrity proposals can account for change blindness.

Top-down mechanisms that regulate attentional control are influenced by task demands and individuals' goals, while bottom-up processes are influenced by salient stimuli. Analogous networks are involved in both processes (e.g., frontostriatal areas). However, they are affected differently by the emotional salience of stimuli, which determines the allocation of attention. This study aims to determine whether the recent pandemic experience continues to exert an influence on cognitive processes. To this end, the study will determine attentional biases toward pandemic-related stimuli compared to negative and neutral stimuli. Furthermore, the study will investigate whether pandemic-related stimuli influence top-down and bottom-up attentional processes and whether the latter affect autonomic control as indexed by Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Ninety-six undergraduate students completed a Flicker Task with stimuli categorized by emotional valence (neutral, negative non-COVID, negative COVID-related). This paradigm involves the presentation of two different pictures, which are identical except for a specific detail. The task required to detect the specific detail that has been changed. Given that the task employs images of natural scenes, participants tend to focus more on specific areas of the scene than others. As a result, changes in central interest (CI) areas are detected more rapidly than changes in marginal interest (MI) areas. Participants' response times (RTs) at the task and their HRV data were used to assess attentional performance and the associated autonomic nervous system activity. The results indicate slower responses to COVID-related stimuli than negative and neutral stimuli for both CI and MI changes, requiring the involvement of bottom-up (CI changes) and top-down (MI changes) processes. The HRV was associated with a slower detection of CI changes in COVID-related scenes. These findings highlight the intricate interplay between emotional salience, attentional mechanisms, and physiological responses to threatening stimuli. Contextual factors, particularly those related to pandemic-related stress, influence attentional processing and its relationship with autonomic activity.

Serial dependence as a mechanism involved in slow change blindness

Classic change blindness is the phenomenon where seemingly obvious changes that coincide with visual disruptions (such as blinks or brief blanks) go unnoticed by an attentive observer. Some early work into the causes of classic change blindness suggested that any pre-change stimulus representation is overwritten by a representation of the altered post-change stimulus, preventing change detection. However, recent work revealed that, even when observers do maintain memory representations of both the pre- and post-change stimulus states, they can still miss the change, suggesting that change blindness can also arise from a failure to compare the stored representations. Here, we studied slow change blindness, a related phenomenon that occurs even in the absence of visual disruptions when the change occurs sufficiently slowly, to determine whether it could be explained by conclusions from classic change blindness. Across three different slow change blindness experiments we found that observers who consistently failed to notice the change had access to at least two memory representations of the changing display. One representation was precise but short lived: a detailed representation of the more recent stimulus states, but fragile. The other representation lasted longer but was fairly general: stable but too coarse to differentiate the various stages of the change. These findings suggest that, although multiple representations are formed, the failure to compare hypotheses might not explain slow change blindness; even if a comparison were made, the representations would be too sparse (longer term stores) or too fragile (short-lived stores) for such comparison to inform about the change.