Modeling the role that short term memory stores and attention play in change blindness

Abstract

Humans tend to think that they see the entire world. However change blindness – the inability to detect salient changes from one view to a next – reveals a different story. Objects in front of people can change without it being noticed. Change blindness does not occur due to poor visibility of the changes, because they can be clearly seen once they are detected. The question addressed in this paper concerns why these salient changes can so easily be missed. The relation between iconic memory, visual short term memory and attention is investigated. How can human access iconic and visual short term memory stores and use this information to detect changes? It is explained why these cognitive functions must operate together in order to detect changes. A new model is presented that describes the role that attention, iconic memory and Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) play. In order to detect changes attended stimuli from iconic memory or a fragile part of VSTM are transferred to a robust form of VSTM. This is necessary for change detection, because representations in the robust part of VSTM are solid enough to detect changes before they are lost from memory.