Investigation of change blindness phenomenon in terms of high level scene perception

Recent research on change blindness phenomenon revealed contradictory findings about scene-object relationship. These discrepant results might be stemming from procedure and task constraints. Therefore, we aimed initially to investigate the effect of the paradigm on change blindness phenomenon during the natural scene viewing in the frame of high-level scene perception. For this purpose, we compared two frequently used change detection tasks: flicker and one-shot paradigms. Secondly, we investigated the influence of both semantic and syntactic relationship between scene and object on the change blindness phenomenon. Finally, we investigated the effect of low-level object property (visual saliency) and its interaction with high-level scene processing on the change blindness phenomenon. During the experiments, eye movements were recorded to examine the active attention mechanisms that act during the change detection performance. Our results suggested that change detection performance and eye movements varied across the different paradigms. We interpreted this result as the influence of different stimuli exposures and different interruptions on processing of visual stimuli throughout the change detection task. In the current study, we demonstrated also that the attention mechanisms, namely attention attraction and attention disengagement, might differ during the change detection performance according to the semantic as well as syntactic relationships between scene and object.