Dramatic Changes to Well-known Places Go Unnoticed

Rosenbaum, R. Shayna, Julia G. Halilova, Sabrina Agnihotri, Maria C. D'Angelo, Gordon Winocur, Jennifer Ryan, and Morris Moscovitch. 2020. “Dramatic Changes to Well-known Places Go Unnoticed.” PsyArXiv. October 30. doi:10.31234/osf.io/ypg96

Abstract: How well do we know our city? It turns out, much more poorly than we might imagine. We used declarative memory and eye-tracking techniques to examine people’s ability to detect modifications of landmarks in Toronto locales with which they have had extensive experience. Participants were poor at identifying which scenes contained altered landmarks, whether the modification was to the landmarks’ relative size, internal features, or surrounding context. To determine whether an indirect measure would prove more sensitive, we tracked eye movements during viewing. Changes in overall visual exploration, but not to specific regions of change, were related to participants’ explicit endorsement of scenes as modified. These results support the contention that very familiar landmarks are strongly integrated within the spatial context in which they were first experienced, so that any changes that are consciously detected are at a global or coarse, but not local or fine-grained, level.