Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Conscious Cogn. 2011 Sep;20(3):534-46. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.02.006. Epub 2011 Apr 2.
People can maintain accurate representations of visual changes without necessarily being aware of them. Here, we investigate whether a similar phenomenon (implicit change detection) also exists in touch. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants detected the presence of a change between two consecutively-presented tactile displays. Tactile change blindness was observed, with participants failing to report the presence of tactile change. Critically, however, when participants had to make a forced choice response regarding the number of stimuli presented in the two displays, their performance was significantly better than chance (i.e., implicit change detection was observed). Experiment 3 demonstrated that tactile change detection does not necessarily involve a shift of spatial attention toward the location of change, regardless of whether the change is explicitly detected. We conclude that tactile change detection likely results from comparing representations of the two displays, rather than by directing spatial attention to the location of the change.
人们可以在没有意识到的情况下，保持对视觉变化的准确表示。在这里，我们研究了这种类似的现象（隐性变化检测）是否也存在于触觉中。在实验 1 和 2 中，参与者检测了两个连续呈现的触觉显示之间是否存在变化。触觉变化盲被观察到，参与者未能报告触觉变化的存在。然而，至关重要的是，当参与者必须对两个显示中呈现的刺激数量进行强制选择反应时，他们的表现明显优于随机水平（即，观察到隐性变化检测）。实验 3 表明，无论是否明确检测到变化，触觉变化检测不一定涉及将空间注意转移到变化位置。我们得出结论，触觉变化检测可能是通过比较两个显示的表示来实现的，而不是将空间注意引导到变化的位置。
