To: cvnet@skivs.ski.org
From: Bill Warren <Bill_Warren@Brown.edu>
Vision researchers who are pondering the Psychonomic Society may be
interested in the following symposium to be held at the fall meeting in
Dallas, Texas, Nov. 19-22, 1998:
Title: "THE GRAND ILLUSION: PERCEPTION AS LESS THAN MEETS THE EYE"
Organizer: Stephen E. Palmer, University of California, Berkeley
Recent results from several paradigms (change blindness,
inattentional blindness, saccadic integration, metacontrast masking, etc.)
converge in showing that our detailed, coherent, stable visual experiences
of the environment are actually based on less perceptual information than
we believe. Much depends on the detail, coherence, and stability of the
environment itself, for when these conditions are violated in certain ways,
perceivers fail miserably in detecting changes. Supportive findings will
be reported and their implications discussed.
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Title: "Change blindness and the dynamic nature of vision"
Author: Ronald A. Rensink, Cambridge Basic Research.
A striking blindness to changes in real-world scenes can be induced
whenever these changes are made during a saccade, flicker, blink, movie
cut, or other such interruption. This blindness provides strong evidence
that we never form a stable, detailed representation of the world around
us. Instead, it appears that our perceptions are based upon a sparse,
"just in time" system that provides stable, detailed representations only
of those objects that are being attended.
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Title: "Change blindness in the real world"
Authors: Daniel J. Simons, Harvard University, and
Daniel T. Levin, Kent State University
People miss substantial changes to objects (or even the objects
themselves) when attention is focused elsewhere. Without attention, we
apparently do not store the details of our visual world. Yet, even changes
to centrally-attended objects can go unnoticed: observers often miss a
change to the central object in a motion picture, and they even fail to
notice when a real-world conversation partner is replaced during a brief
interruption. Together, these findings suggest that attention is
necessary, but not sufficient for change detection.
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Title: "Saccadic Disintegration"
Author: David E. Irwin, University of Illinois.
The visual world appears stable and continuous despite frequent eye
movements that disrupt visual input. At one time it was believed that
this quality of perception is achieved by integrating visual information
across eye movements. Several lines of research demonstrate instead that
very little information is integrated or maintained across eye movements,
indicating that our perception of a coherent visual world is based largely
on the contents of working memory and the current eye fixation.
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Title: "Perceiving with and without attention: Competition for
consciousness among visual events"
Authors: Vince Di Lollo, University of British Columbia and
James T. Enns, University of British Columbia.
Iterative feed-back signalling is now recognized as the main form
of communication between brain areas. We believe that perception,
attention, and short-term memory are expressions of this form of brain
organization. Namely, perception of attended objects is based on iterative
comparisons between dynamic brain representations and the external world.
We report on experiments in masking and attention which defy explanation by
feed-forward theories, but are explained naturally by a model of iterative
reentrant brain functioning.
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Title: "Inattentional blindness"
Author: Arien Mack, The New School for Social Research
The phenomenon of Inattentional Blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998)
coupled with the finding that a small number of highly salient stimuli,
(one's name, a happy face and human stick figure) resist IB support the
view that only objects engaging attention are consciously perceived.
Evidence that attention significantly affects metacontrast also supports
this hypothesis. However, evidence that stimuli subject to IB may produce
semantic priming suggests these unseen stimuli are deeply processed and
encoded.
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Title: "How quickly they forget. A modest alternative to blinks
and blindness"
Author: Jeremy M. Wolfe, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and
Women's Hospital
Claims that you do not see that which is not attended fly in the
face of common sense. That, of course, is what makes those claims
interesting. We think we see something everywhere all of the time.
Inattentional blindness and change blindness say we do not. However,
perhaps commonsense is correct. I will argue that we do see something
everywhere - 'something' that is largely preattentive. We simply forget
it before we can report it.
-- Bill
William H. Warren, Professor
Dept. of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
Box 1978
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
(401) 863-3980 ofc, 863-2255 FAX
Bill_Warren@brown.edu