Hide-and-seek around the centre of interest: The dead zone of attention revealed by change blindness

Abstract

Three experiments examined spatial allocation of attention during active search for visual changes. In all experiments, there were three conditions of change location related to a centre of interest: (1) Central (most attended location itself), (2) near, and (3) far marginal change. In Experiment 1, participants showed the slowest search and the largest number of undetected changes in near condition. Moreover, they misidentified near changes more frequently than central and far ones. In Experiment 2, participants had to search for marginal changes in the presence of a once noticed central change that summoned additional attention to a central location. It resulted in further search slowing for near changes. In Experiment 3, participants searched for one of two concurrent marginal changes in the presence of a central one. They detected far changes about 2.3 times more frequently than near ones. Taken together, these results support the notion of “dead zone of attention” surrounding attentional focus. Several speculations about the nature of dead zone are discussed.

Keywords:

• Change blindness
• Dead zone of attention
• Spatial attention

Acknowledgements

The study was implemented within the Programme of Fundamental Studies of the Higher School of Economics in 2011. I would like to thank Olga A. Mikhailova who helped in conducting and analysing a pilot experiment with eye movement registration. I would also like to thank Alexei N. Gusev and Alexander E. Kremlev who have designed and developed software used in the present experiment, and all participants of the present study. I am also grateful to Maria Falikman, Diego Fernandez-Duque, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the early drafts of the paper, which permitted improvement of both the study and the text.