Trajectory changes are susceptible to change blindness manipulations

People routinely fail to notice that things have changed in a visual scene if they do not perceive the changes in the process of occurring, a phenomenon known as ‘change blindness’ (1,2). The majority of lab-based change blindness studies use static stimuli and require participants to identify simple changes such as alterations in stimulus orientation or scene composition. This study uses a ‘flicker’ paradigm adapted for dynamic stimuli which allowed for both simple orientation changes and more complex trajectory changes. Participants were required to identify a moving rectangle which underwent one of these changes against a background of moving rectangles which did not. The results demonstrated that participants’ ability to correctly identify the target deteriorated with the presence of a visual mask and a larger number of distractor objects, consistent with findings in previous change blindness work. The study provides evidence that the flicker paradigm can be used to induce change blindness with dynamic stimuli, and that changes to predictable trajectories are detected or missed in the similar way as orientation changes.