No Blindness for Things that Do Not Change

Abstract

It is well known that under normal circumstances, human observers are able to detect a visual change (a luminance transient) in the outside world very easily. This study demonstrated that observers are also easily able to detect a non-changing element if it is located in a display containing multiple elements that do change. That is, a nonchanging element popped out from a display containing multiple changing elements (luminance transients). The efficient detection of the nonchanging element may be due to temporal grouping created by the dynamic character of the stimulus display.