ERP effects of change localization, change identification, and change blindness

Abstract

Change blindness is the failure to detect changes in visual scenes. Changes can elicit phenomenologically different perceptual experiences, possibly relating to different mechanisms: changes may be entirely missed, merely detected, located, or identified. We presented sequences of meaningful objects, one of which could change between the presentations. Changes had to be located and identified. Observers sometimes located the change without knowing which object had changed. However, effects of localization with and without identification were remarkably similar on a sequence of event-related potential components (including change-related positivity and N2pc). Only a late contralateral positivity was found exclusively for identified changes, indicating that change localization and change identification initially rely on a common processing sequence and differ only at later stages.