Abstract
A large body of work suggests that the visual system is particularly sensitive to the appearance of new objects. This is based partly on evidence from visual search studies showing that onsets capture attention whereas many other types of visual event do not. Recently, however, the notion that object onset has a special status in visual attention has been challenged. For instance, an object that looms toward an observer has also been shown to capture attention. In two experiments, we investigated whether onset receives processing priority over looming. Observers performed a change detection task in which one of the display objects either loomed or receded, or a new object appeared. Results showed that looming objects were more resistant to change blindness than receding objects. Crucially, however, the appearance of a new object was less susceptible to change blindness than both looming and receding. We argue that the visual system is particularly sensitive to object onsets.
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This work was supported by U.K. Economic and Social Research Council Grant RES-000-22-0888 to the first author and U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Grant 12/S19168 to the second author.
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Cole, G.G., Liversedge, S.P. Change blindness and the primacy of object appearance. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 13, 588–593 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193967
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193967