Change Is A Visual Feature

At each moment our retina presents us with a brand new and never before experienced visual scene. That is, the visual world is constantly changing. But what if change itself were a visual feature that can be used to individuate and re-identify an object in vision (e.g., the changing one)? Traditionally, a method for identifying and tracking individuals over time has been the object specific preview benefit (OSPB). Here, we replicate well-known successes using OSPB (e.g., an object survives movement and occlusion and can be re-identified by spatial trajectory, color, and shape) and we test a new visual feature: change itself. Across 3 experiments we find that a constantly changing value in visual feature space can be used to re-identify an object as the same one seen earlier leading to a successful OSPB effect. That is, change-in-a-feature, is itself a visual feature.