Unconscious Priming: Masked Primes Facilitate Change Detection and Change Identification Performance

Change blindness refers to the finding that people have difficulty detecting changes between visual scenes, when these scenes are separated by a brief interruption to visual input. The masked priming paradigm was integrated into a change detection task using real world photos to examine if unconsciously perceived words could assist in the detection and identification of changes. Results demonstrated superior detection accuracy for deletion and location changes compared to addition changes and that change detection response times were shorter for deletion than either addition or location changes. Identification of deletion and addition changes was better than for location changes. Both change detection and identification performances were enhanced by a masked identity prime presented prior to the first scene in the change detection task. These results provide evidence that unattended information can assist change detection and change identification performance.