Change blindness for cast shadows in natural scenes: Even informative shadow changes are missed

Krista A. Ehinger, Kala Allen, Jeremy M. Wolfe

Previous work has shown that human observers discount or neglect cast shadows in natural and artificial scenes across a range of visual tasks. This is a reasonable strategy for a visual system designed to recognize objects under a range of lighting conditions, since cast shadows are not intrinsic properties of the scene-they look different (or disappear entirely) under different lighting conditions. However, cast shadows can convey useful information about the three-dimensional shapes of objects and their spatial relations. In this study, we investigated how well people detect changes to cast shadows, presented in natural scenes in a change blindness paradigm, and whether shadow changes that imply the movement or disappearance of an object are more easily noticed than shadow changes that imply a change in lighting. In Experiment 1, a critical object's shadow was removed, rotated to another direction, or shifted down to suggest that the object was floating. All of these shadow changes were noticed less often than changes to physical objects or surfaces in the scene, and there was no difference in the detection rates for the three types of changes. In Experiment 2, the shadows of visible or occluded objects were removed from the scenes. Although removing the cast shadow of an occluded object could be seen as an object deletion, both types of shadow changes were noticed less often than deletions of the visible, physical objects in the scene. These results show that even informative shadow changes are missed, suggesting that cast shadows are discounted fairly early in the processing of natural scenes.