Changing scenes: memory for naturalistic events following change blindness

Research on scene perception indicates that viewers often fail to detect large changes to scene regions when these changes occur during a visual disruption such as a saccade or a movie cut. In two experiments, we examined whether this relative inability to detect changes would produce systematic biases in event memory. In Experiment 1, participants decided whether two successively presented images were the same or different, followed by a memory task, in which they recalled the content of the viewed scene. In Experiment 2, participants viewed a short video, in which an actor carried out a series of daily activities, and central scenes' attributes were changed during a movie cut. A high degree of change blindness was observed in both experiments, and these effects were related to scene complexity (Experiment 1) and level of retrieval support (Experiment 2). Most important, participants reported the changed, rather than the initial, event attributes following a failure in change detection. These findings suggest that attentional limitations during encoding contribute to biases in episodic memory.