Although change detection constitutes an important and pervasive process in our everyday lives, phenomena such as change blindness show that we are quite limited in our ability to notice even large changes in visual scenes. Change detection is greatly dependant on attention deployment which can be influenced by the contextual setting in which a target item is presented. In this study we wanted to further address the influence of semantic relatedness of the changing item and the surrounding stimuli on the efficiency of change detection. The obtained results indicate that the contextual setting in which a changing element is presented influences the detection of changes. Change detection is generally more efficient in situations when changes are related to items incongruent with the surrounding context when compared to situations where an object belonging to the same category as surrounding items changes into another object from the same category.

change detection, contextual setting, semantic relatedness