Eye movements and visual memory: Detecting changes to saccade targets in scenes

Saccade-contingent change detection provides a powerful tool for investigating scene representation and scene memory. In the present study, critical objects presented within color images of naturalistic scenes were changed during a saccade toward or away from the target. During the saccade, the critical object was changed to another object type, to a visually different token of the same object type, or was deleted from the scene. There were three main results. First, the deletion of a saccade target was special: Detection performance for saccade target deletions was very good, and this level of performance did not decline with the amplitude of the saccade. In contrast, detection of type and token changes at the saccade target, and of all changes including deletions at a location that had just been fixated but was not the saccade target, decreased as the amplitude of the saccade increased. Second, detection performance for type and token changes, both when the changing object was the target of the saccade and when the object had just been fixated but was not the saccade target, was well above chance. Third, mean gaze durations were reliably elevated for those trials in which the change was not overtly detected. The results suggest that the presence of the saccade target plays a special role in transsaccadic integration, and together with other recent findings, suggest more generally that a relatively rich scene representation is retained across saccades and stored in visual memory.