Large capacity storage of integrated objects before change blindness

Normal people have a strikingly low ability to detect changes in a visual scene. In the present study, Ss were asked to detect changes in the orientation of rectangular figures in a textured display across a 1600 ms gray interval. In the first experiment, change detection improved when the location of a possible change was cued during the interval. The cue remained effective during the entire interval, but after the interval, it was ineffective, suggesting that an initially large representation was overwritten by the post-change display. To control for an effect of light intensity during the interval on the decay of the representation, performance was compared with a gray or a white interval screen in a second experiment. No difference between these conditions was found. In the third experiment, attention was occasionally misdirected during the interval by first cueing the wrong figure before cueing the correct figure. This did not compromise performance compared to a single cue, indicating that when an item is attentionally selected, the representation of yet unchosen items remains available. In the fourth experiment, the cue was shown to be effective when changes in figure size and orientation were randomly mixed.