Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change Blindness

this memory and can explicitly report details of a changed object in response to probing questions. The results of these real-world change detection studies are discussed in the context of broader claims about change blindness. 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Our experience of a rich, stable visual world often leads to the intuitive belief that our representations of that world are correspondingly detailed and precise. But increasing evidence for "change blindness," the inability to detect large changes to scenes from one glance to the next, has inspired claims that little to no information about the world is preserved in visual short term memory (e.g., O'Regan, 1992; Rensink, 2000a, 2000b). Such claims have some historical precedents (e.g., Gibson, 1986/1979; Hochberg, 1986; Stroud, 1955), but they do not necessarily follow from change blindness. Change blindness could occur for many reasons, even when observers have representations of the pre-change scene (Simons, 2000b). For example, change blindness could reflect a failure to compare representations of the pre- and post-change scene. Here, we present evidence that supports this possibility by showing that some subjects who fail to report a change can subsequently report features of the pre-change object when aske