Guest Lecture: Tim Smith (Edinburgh)
Our experience of the visual world is an illusion stitched together from minimal visual details encoded over time. Unattended visual details may change without us noticing (Change Blindness) but given enough time exhaustive exploration of a static scene will result in a reasonably comprehensive representation of the scene. However, the dynamics of the real-world mean that attention has to be distributed in both space and time. The added time pressures may mean that how we control our attention and what we perceive in dynamic scenes may be qualitatively different to static scenes. To date, dynamic scenes have received very little empirical attention. In this talk I will present a series of experiments demonstrating that awareness in dynamic scenes is tightly linked to fixation location and what we fixate is predominantly controlled by endogenous (cognitive) rather than exogenous (visual) factors. Strong endogenous control of attention allows large visual changes that would normally capture attention in static scenes to pass unnoticed. Demonstrations of change blindness in film editing and magic tricks show how the distribution of attention and awareness is qualitatively different in dynamic scenes compared to static scenes and highlight the need for more sophisticated models of dynamic scene perception. All are welcome!
