What's scene and not seen: Influences of movement and task upon what we see

Studies concerning the processing of natural scenes using eye movement equi pment have revealed that observers retain surprisingly little information f rom one fixation to the next. Other studies, in which fixation remained con stant while elements within the scene were changed, have shown that, even w ithout refixation, objects within a scene are surprisingly poorly represent ed. Although this effect has been studied in some detail in static scenes, there has been relatively little work on scenes as we would normally experi ence them, namely dynamic and ever changing. This paper describes a compara ble form of change blindness in dynamic scenes, in which detection is perfo rmed in the presence of simulated observer motion. The study also describes how change blindness is affected by the manner in which the observer inter acts with the environment, by comparing detection performance of an observe r as the passenger or driver of a car. The experiments show that observer m otion reduces the detection of orientation and location changes, and that t he task of driving causes a concentration of object analysis on or near the line of motion, relative to passive viewing of the same scene.