Crossmodal change blindness between vision and touch

Malika Auvray, Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University

Abstract
Change blindness is the name given to people’s inability to detect changes introduced between two consecutively-presented scenes, when they are separated by a distractor that masks the transients that are typically associated with change. Change blindness has been reported to occur within vision, audition, and recently within touch as well, but has never previously been investigated when successive patterns are presented to different sensory modalities. We investigated people’s ability to detect the presence of positional changes when the two to-be-compared patterns belonged to the same sensory modality (i.e., both visual or both tactile) and when one of the stimulus patterns was tactile while the other was presented visually. The two patterns of stimulation delivered on participants’ body were presented consecutively, separated by a 250 ms empty interval, or else separated by a masked interval of similar duration. Change blindness was elicited when a mask (either tactile or visual) was inserted between the two consecutively-presented patterns. The magnitude of this change blindness effect was similar nomatter whether both patterns were tactile or one pattern was presented in either modality. These results suggest that the detection of positional changes may be related to a multisensory/amodal underlying mechanism.

Not available

Back to Abstract