Visuospatial Complexity and Change Blindness in Naturalistic Dynamic Environments

Visuospatial attention is critical in many everyday activities, especially those involving embodied multimodal interaction between humans and their surrounding environment. Driving, cycling, or navigating an urban environment, are some of these complex activities which require maintenance of situational awareness of the surrounding environment while at the same time, people need to perform planning and execution of control actions (steering, braking).

To investigate the dynamic environment where these everyday activities take place, we extract visuospatial characteristics including clutter, geometry, motion, etc. and everyday interactions with other users and construct a cognitive model of visuospatial complexity. In a series of behavioral studies, conducted in the naturalistic virtual environments, we combine qualitative and quantitive methods to explore the effect of visuospatial and temporal complexity on visual attention along these continuous everyday activities.

The findings reveal a critical effect of visuospatial complexity on high-level visual processing, where an increase in complexity leads to a substantial increase in change blindness performance. However, the results also show mitigation strategies employed as a response to the load, by adjusting their focus and avoiding non-productive forms of attentional elaboration. These insights enhance our understanding of cognitive adaptation in real-world tasks and carry implications for driving education, assistive technologies, and the design of immersive media. 

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