Color onsets and offsets, and luminance changes can cause change blindness

It has recently been demonstrated that people often fail to detect between-view changes in their visual environment. This phenomenon, called 'change blindness' (CB), occurs whenever the perceptual transient that usually accompanies a change is somehow blocked, or made less salient. In the well-known flicker paradigm, the transient is blocked by inserting a blank screen between the original and changed scenes. We tested whether transients that do not involve the appearance or disappearance of visual objects would also produce CB. Therefore we tested whether the appearance or disappearance of color information, and increments or decrements in luminance, could cause CB. In three experiments, subjects searched for changes in natural scenes. We found that both color transients and luminance transients significantly reduced change detection (by approximately 30%) relative to a no-transient condition.