Stella X. Yu : Papers / Google Scholar

Change Blindness Reveals Distinctive Featural Processing in Size, Color, and Orientation
Stella X. Yu and Dimitri Lisin
Technical Report TR-13-001, International Computer Science Institute, February 2013
Paper

Abstract
Visual search experiments in static displays have long established that size, color, and orientation are elementary features whose attributes are processed in parallel and available to guide the deployment of attention. Using a gaze-tracked flicker paradigm for change blindness and stimuli rendered identically in space and separately in the 3 feature dimensions, we investigate whether and how these features distinguish themselves in the active deployment of attention during prolonged visual search. We find out that visual search does not show any attentional modulation in orientation, whereas it engages spatial attention in color with shorter saccades between the same color, and it engages featural attention in size with shorter fixation from previewing the same size as well as tuning into a particular size. Thus, in terms of dynamic attribute processing over time, size, color, and orientation are highly distinctive: Between successive fixations, only orientation is truly pre-attentive without any form of priming, whereas size and color deploy attention in the featural and spatial domains respectively.

Keywords
visual attention, change blindness, elementary features, feature transition, visual crowding