Two Cues Of Change Detection: Topological Structure Or Brightness Contrast

People often fail to detect big changes to scenes, provided that the changes occur during a visual disruption. This phenomenon was known as "change blindness". The pervasiveness of the inability to detect changes is consistent with the theoretical notion that we internally represent relatively little information from our visual world from one glance at a scene to the next. In this study a change-detection paradigm was used to explore the nature of information used to recognize topological structure in three experiments. In particular, whether we were sensitive to changes in brightness contrast. Experiment one's results show that spatial configuration or topological structure changes made to the object parts are significantly easier and quicker to detect than changes made to the shape of object parts. Experiment 2 shows that changes including the stronger contrast in brightness are significantly easier and quicker to detect than those including the weaker contrast in brightness. The results of Experiment 3 using divided-attention approach show the same pattern as Experiment 2, though the degree of blindness encountered is generally much higher than the former. These findings are discussed in relation to the nature of visual representations and topological properties. We suggest that topological structure is alternatively explained by brightness contrast.