Hypotheses/Predictions

Ok, so how can we test this theory? Recall that the central idea of this theory is that, in our brains, a complete visual picture of the world is continuously updated, easily accessible, and perpetually available to us. The integrative visual buffer should put the fixations together and any change between the fixations should be immediately obvious. This means (and here is the hypothesis) that we should be quite sensitive to any visual change that occurs in the world from one fixation to the next.

So how can we test this idea? One way is to monitor a person's eye movements as they look at a computer image. Recall that during a saccade a person is essentially blind. Techniques exist today that allow experimenters to change a computer image of natural scenes during a person's saccade (Grimes, 1996). The advantage of this method is that by making the change during the saccade, people can not directly perceive the change and detect it on that basis alone. To detect any change, they must compare the current fixation with information that was represented from the prior fixation. But ... we can't use this technique here.

We need to think of a way to change a picture, but without letting us see the change taking place