Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Foreground-background segmentation and attention: a change blindness study.

Veronica Mazza1, Massimo Turatto, Carlo Umiltà

  • 1Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131 Padova, Italy. veronica.mazza@unipd.it

Psychological Research
|December 15, 2004
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Beyond expectations: nocebo suggestion affects cognitive performance in older adults.

Psychological research·2026
Same author

The dual impact of irrelevant visual onsets: Habituation of capture unlocks onset facilitation.

Attention, perception & psychophysics·2025
Same author

Ignoring distractors takes its (memory) toll.

Cognition·2025
Same author

Perceptual Organization Facilitates Object-Based Distractor Filtering.

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)·2025
Same author

Anticipatory and reactive mechanisms of habituation to visual distractors.

Scientific reports·2025
Same author

Within-trial and across-trials habituation mechanisms to irrelevant visual transients.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2025
Same journal

Poorer event-based compared to time-based prospective memory in a computerized household chores task.

Psychological research·2026
Same journal

Self-other discrimination in face recognition depending on personal familiarity: investigating a sample consisting of Japanese and Han Chinese women.

Psychological research·2026
Same journal

Sounds of creativity: musical, creative, and language factors associated with singing and creative singing.

Psychological research·2026
Same journal

Does sport expertise bridge the sex gap in mental rotation? Bayesian evidence for the critical role of visuospatial demands.

Psychological research·2026
Same journal

The development of an optimal learning strategy for high-similarity categories: the effect of example sequence on children's category learning.

Psychological research·2026
Same journal

Musical training increases anticipatory responding and predictive control in sequence learning.

Psychological research·2026
See all related articles

Visual attention research reveals that attention is primarily directed to foreground elements. Background changes often go unnoticed unless attention is deliberately focused there, highlighting a default bias toward the foreground.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Visual Perception
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Visual attention research has focused on figure-ground segmentation's influence on attention.
  • Foreground-background segmentation's role in attentional deployment has been largely overlooked.
  • Gestalt principles suggest greater salience for foreground elements.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether attention is preferentially allocated to foreground or background elements.
  • To explore the role of foreground-background segmentation in visual attention deployment.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a change blindness paradigm to assess attentional allocation.
  • Manipulated changes in the color of foreground and background elements.
  • Measured participants' ability to detect these changes.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Large changes in background color were frequently missed unless attention was voluntarily directed.
  • Minor changes in foreground elements were readily detected.
  • Significant differences in change blindness were observed between foreground and background regions.

Conclusions:

  • Attention is inherently biased towards foreground elements by default.
  • Foreground-background segmentation significantly influences the deployment of visual attention.
  • Findings support Gestaltist observations of foreground salience over background.