Effects of scene inversion on change detection of targets matched for visual salience

Abstract

This work examines how context may influence the detection of changes in flickering scenes. Each scene contained two changes that were matched for low-level visual salience. One of the changes was of high interest to the meaning of the scene, and the other was of lower interest. High-interest changes were more readily detected. To further examine the effects of contextual significance, we inverted the scene orientation to disrupt top-down effects of global context while controlling for contributions of visual salience. In other studies, inverting scene orientation has had inconsistent effects on detection of high-interest changes. However, this experiment demonstrated that inverting scene orientation significantly reduced the advantage for high-interest changes in comparison to lower-interest changes. Thus, scene context influences the deployment of attention and change-detection performance, and this top-down influence may be disrupted by scene inversion.