People often fail to notice large changes to visual scenes, a phenomenon known as change blindness. As a research area it has a relatively short history, because this topic just recently got the attention of scientists. Especially interface designers show more and more interest and benefit from studies about change blindness. Some work has already been done to explain change blindness, which resulted in several theories. Topics which have been under-explored involve how individual differences between people and contextual differences in situations influence change detection as a function of the semantic content of a scene. To date, research has primarily focused on difference in age, expertise and cognitive load. In this report a contextual difference is introduced other than cognitive task; difference in role. Role is here defined as the behaviour and responsibilities expected for a group or individual in a certain setting. In a change detection task each role can result in a unique behaviour. With the same task, differences in role then can result in difference in behaviour, which probably results in a variation in scan path and attention for objects. It could then be that this difference in role, while cognitive load and other interpersonal factors are equal, influences change blindness as a function of the semantic content of a scene. For example, in traffic, the same situation may be perceived differently by a pedestrian than by a car driver. Traffic situations relevant to the pedestrian may be ignored by the car driver, and vice versa. Thus, one would expect there to be a difference in change detection time between people immersed in a pedestrian role scenario versus those immersed in a car driver scenario. Therefore, it's hypothesized that response time between the roles will be different when the changes are semantically relevant for just one specific role. The findings of the present study make a strong case that role influences change detection when semantically relevant changes for that particular role have to be detected. For semantically irrelevant changes, role does not affect change detection. (Author/publisher)
Abstract