Failures of retrieval and comparison constrain change detection in natural scenes

In a change detection paradigm, a target object in a natural scene either rotated in depth, was replaced by another object token, or remained the same. Change detection performance was reliably higher when a target postcue allowed participants to restrict retrieval and comparison processes to the target object (Experiment 1). Change detection performance remained excellent when the target object was not attended at change (Experiment 2) and when a concurrent verbal working memory load minimized the possibility of verbal encoding (Experiment 3). Together, these data demonstrate that visual representations accumulate in memory from attended objects as the eyes and attention are oriented within a scene and that change blindness derives, at least in part, from retrieval and comparison failure.