Investigating the Effects of Interruptions and Reliable Cueing on Change Detection within Dynamic Scenes

The goal of the present study was to examine the effects of cuing and task interruptions on change detection within dynamic scenes. Undergraduate students watched 24 brief videos (12 containing interruptions) for anomalous feature changes appearing in 8 videos. Half of the object changes occurred during a visual occlusion, while the others contained no interruption. All videos were unique and depicted various dynamic scenes. Participants were assigned at random to one of three conditions containing cues to the changes (reliable, unreliable, or no cue). The results showed that more object changes were detected during uninterrupted vs. interrupted trials. More object changes were detected with reliable vs. unreliable cues for uninterrupted trials. Providing reliable cues had no benefit over the other conditions when interruptions were present. Overall, these results suggest that visual interruptions may degrade information stored in memory, which could compromise visual monitoring tasks.