Visual marking and change blindness: Moving occluders and transient masks neutralize shape changes to ignored objects.

Watson, Derrick G.; Kunar, Melina A. · 2010 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1037/a0020565

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Summary

This paper investigates the mechanisms of visual marking and change blindness, specifically examining whether shape changes to ignored objects can re-capture attention when those changes are masked by moving occluders or transient stimuli. The research is motivated by previous findings that visible shape changes to previewed distractors abolish the "preview benefit" (the efficiency gain from suppressing old items to prioritize new ones), whereas luminance or color changes do not. The authors sought to determine if this sensitivity to shape changes persists when the changes are not directly visible due to occlusion or masking, thereby testing the ecological validity of visual selection mechanisms and their relationship to change blindness phenomena. The study comprises five experiments using a visual search paradigm where participants searched for a target among distractors. In the preview conditions, a set of distractors was presented first, followed by new distractors and the target. The key manipulation involved whether the initial distractors changed shape (e.g., from right-angle brackets to Hs) when the new items appeared, and whether this change was visible or masked by moving blocks (occluders). Experiment 1 compared visible shape changes with occluded shape changes, finding that neither abolished the preview benefit when moving occluders were present, contrary to previous findings where visible changes disrupted suppression. Experiment 2 replicated this using circular occluders to rule out feature-based inhibition carry-over from rectangular occluders, confirming that the preview benefit remained intact regardless of shape changes. Experiment 3 tested whether inhibition spreads from occluders to nearby locations, finding that items appearing near inhibited occluders were also suppressed. Experiments 4 and 5 further explored the effects of revealed items and non-moving luminance transients, consistently showing that masking transients prevent object changes from capturing attention. The main finding is that moving occluders and transient masks effectively neutralize the attentional capture typically caused by shape changes to ignored objects. When shape changes occurred behind moving blocks or were masked by transients, the preview benefit was preserved, indicating that the visual system did not detect the changes or reset the inhibitory template. This suggests that the visual marking mechanism relies on visible transients to detect changes; if these transients are masked, the changes go unnoticed, and the suppression of old items remains active. The results imply that the mechanisms underlying visual marking and change blindness are closely linked, both requiring unmasked transients for change detection. These findings have significant implications for theories of visual attention and change blindness. They support the view that visual marking involves an active inhibitory template that is only reset by detected changes, which in turn depend on visible transients. The study demonstrates that the visual system’s ability to prioritize new stimuli is robust against masked changes, highlighting the ecological importance of transient signals in guiding attention. This work clarifies the conditions under which ignored objects can re-compete for attention, suggesting that mere physical change is insufficient if it is not perceptually accessible via unmasked transients.

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Topics

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• inattentional change blindness
• visual search