Effects of modally completed surfaces on change detection

The phenomenon of change blindness suggests that we have a severe capacity limitation in scene perception. The storage of surface representations can overcome this limitation by providing efficient cues about objects in the world. Five experiments examined whether subjective surfaces are preferentially processed in visual short-term memory (VSTM) in a change detection task using a flicker paradigm. Even with the same amount of physical change applied to the figures, people were faster and more accurate in detecting a change involving the presence and absence of a subjective surface than in detecting changes involving subjective contours or rotational symmetry. The effects were not solely due to the configuration of the inducers or to the attentional set. The advantage for the subjective surface reflects the faster encoding into VSTM. Modally completed surfaces play important roles not only in visual perception and search, but also in visual cognition involving VSTM.