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Call for Papers: Special Issue
Induced Failures of Visual Awareness
Research over the past half century has produced extensive evidence that observers cannot report or retain all of the details of their visual world from one moment to the next. During the past decade, a new set of studies has illustrated just how pervasive these limits are. For example, early evidence for the failure to detect changes to simple dot patterns and arrays of letters generalizes to more naturalistic displays such as photographs and motion pictures. This failure to report changes (change blindness) can be induced in both simple and naturalistic displays, provided that the change signals that normally accompany the change are disrupted in some way (such as by eye movements, flashed blank screens, blinks, transients, masks, etc.).
Other forms of induced failures of conscious perception have reinforced the broad conclusion that given the right timing, we are often unaware of what would otherwise be fully-visible stimuli. For example, observers often fail to report a visible but unexpected stimulus provided that attention is focused on some other object or event in the display (inattentional blindness). Similarly, stimuli are often undetected if they are repeated (repetition blindness). Observers can also fail to detect a stimulus in a rapid stream of stimuli provided they had to perform an attention-demanding task shortly before the stimulus appeared (the attention blink).
All of these findings suggest limitations on visual awareness, and they have produced a renewed interest in exploring the limitations on perception, attention, and representation. Are these limitations due to failures of perception? Of memory? Of comparisons over time? What is preserved with and without awareness?
This special issue explores recent work on induced failures of visual awareness, and the mechanisms that underlie them. We particularly welcome submission of papers that investigate the nature of the information preserved and the information lost in the face of failures of awareness. We encourage the submission of empirical reports as well as papers adopting a computational approach.
Guest Editors:
Daniel J. Simons
Harvard University
dsimons@wjh.harvard.edu
Ronald A. Rensink
University of British Columbia
rensink@psych.ubc.ca
Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2002
Target publication date: August 1, 2002
Contributors to the Journal of Vision are encouraged to use images, color, movies, and other digital enhancements to help communicate their ideas. Authors interested in submitting a paper to this special issue should follow the Instructions for Authors.
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