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Abstract

Studies concerning the processing of natural scenes using eye movement equipment
have revealed that observers retain surprisingly little information from one
fixation to the next. Other studies, in which fixation remained constantwhile elements
within the scene were changed, have shown that, even without refixation,
objects within a scene are surprisingly poorly represented. Although this effect
has been studied in some detail in static scenes, there has been relatively little
work on scenes as we would normally experience them, namely dynamic and
ever changing. This paper describes a comparable form of change blindness in
dynamic scenes, in which detection is performed in the presence of simulated
observer motion. The study also describes how change blindness is affected by
the manner in which the observer interacts with the environment, by comparing
detection performance of an observer as the passenger or driver of a car. The
experiments show that observer motion reduces the detection of orientation and
location changes, and that the task of driving causes a concentration of object
analysis on or near the line of motion, relative to passive viewing of the same
scene.