FAILURE TO DETECT CHANGES TO ATTENDED OBJECTS IN MOTION-PICTURES

Our intuition that we richly represent the visual details of our envir onment is illusory. When viewing a scene, we seem to use detailed repr esentations of object properties and interobject relations to achieve a sense of continuity across views. Yet, several recent studies show t hat human observers fail to detect changes to objects and object prope rties when localized retinal information signaling a change is masked or eliminated (e.g., by eye movements). However, these studies changed arbitrarily chosen objects which may have been outside the focus of a ttention. We draw on previous research showing the importance of spati otemporal information for tracking objects by creating short motion pi ctures in which objects in both arbitrary locations and the very cente r of attention were changed. Adult observers failed to notice changes in both cases, even when the sole actor in a scene transformed into an other person across an instantaneous change in camera angle (or ''cut' ').