Event-related brain potential evidence for implicit change detection: a replication of Fernandez-Duque et al. (2003)

Change blindness studies using explicit behavioral measures have revealed that humans are remarkably poor at explicitly detecting changes between two successive visual images until focused attention is drawn to the changes, which supports the notion that outside the range of focused attention, our mental representations of the visual world are so volatile as to be unable to support detection of changes. However, change blindness studies using implicit behavioral measures have revealed that changes outside the range of focused attention might be detected even in the absence of awareness, which supports the possibility that our mental representations are not so volatile as has been suggested. The purpose of the present study was to provide further evidence for implicit change detection using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). For this purpose, we compared ERPs elicited on trials where color changes were present but participants failed to report the presence of changes (Change blindness trials) and ERPs on trials where changes were absent and participants correctly did not report the presence of changes (No-change trials). The result showed that compared to No-change trials, Change blindness trials elicited a frontal/central positivity at around 160-180ms, which is highly consistent with the result of Fernandez-Duque et al. [D. Fernandez-Duque, G. Grossi, I.M. Thornton, H.J. Neville, Representation of change: separate electrophysiolocal markers of attention, awareness, and implicit processing, J. Cogn. Neurosci. 15 (2003) 491-507] who firstly reported an ERP correlate of implicit change detection. This result provides further evidence for implicit change detection, which supports the notion that even outside the range of focused attention, our mental representations of the visual world are robust at least enough to support implicit detection of changes.