When searching helps you see: Bridging the gap between incidental and intentional change detection

Participants in incidental change detection studies often miss large changes to visually salient or conceptually relevant objects such as actor substitutions across video cuts, but there are competing explanations of why participants fail to detect these changes. According to an integrative processing account, object-based attention typically induces integrated representation and comparison processes sufficient to detect changes to that object. On this view, participants miss changes in incidental paradigms because those paradigms fail to elicit the level of attention necessary to trigger integrated representation and comparison processes. In contrast, a selective processing account posits that representation and comparison processes needed to detect changes do not occur by default, even for attended objects, but are only elicited in response to specific functional needs. In four experiments, we tested detection of actor substitutions when participants engaged in tasks that required actor identity processing but did not necessarily require the combination of processes necessary to detect changes. Change blindness for actor substitutions persisted when participants counted the number of actors in the video and sometimes persisted when participants were instructed to remember the substituted actor for later recall. Change blindness consistently diminished, however, when participants were shown the prechange actor before or during the video and instructed to search for that actor in the video. Our results refine the contrast between selective and integrative processing by specifying how task demands to create durable visual representations can remain independent of comparison processes, while search demands can induce integrative comparison processes in a naturalistic setting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).