The Impact of Natural Visual Interruptions and Cueing on Detecting Changes in Dynamic Scenes

The goal of the present study was to examine how naturalistic interruptions (head turns) and cueing affect change detection within dynamic scenes. Based on the memory for goals (Altmann & Trafton, 2002) and visual memory theories (Hollingsworth & Henderson, 2001), participants monitoring videos were expected to detect fewer target changes when interrupted than without interruptions. Additionally, reliable cues that provided information about the target were expected to improve target detection compared to neutral cues (Logan, 1996; Posner, Snyder, & Davidson, 1980). Undergraduate students were assigned to one of two cueing conditions (reliable or neutral) and watched twenty videos. Ten of the videos were interrupted by having participants turn their heads to attend to a secondary display while an object changed in the video on the primary monitor. Eight videos (half with and without interruptions) had a single object that underwent a perceptual feature change in color, brightness, appearance, or disappearance. Overall, participants were very poor at detecting target changes. However, participants detected more object changes during uninterrupted versus interrupted trials. Providing a cue related to the object change did not improve detection performance. Overall, these results support other dynamic change detection findings that show the difficulty of detecting targets within dynamic environments even when provided reliable information.