Global transsaccadic change blindness during scene perception

Each time the eyes are spatially reoriented via a saccadic eye movement, the image falling on the retina changes. How visually specific are the representations that are functional across saccades during active scene perception? This question was investigated with a saccade-contingent display-change paradigm in which pictures of complex real-world scenes were globally changed in real time during eye movements. The global changes were effected by presenting each scene as an alternating set of scene strips and occluding gray bars, and by reversing the strips and bars during specific saccades. The results from two experiments demonstrated a global transsaccadic change-blindness effect, suggesting that point-by-point visual representations are not functional across saccades during complex scene perception.