The effects of prior experience often persist despite their futility. For example, vision scientists who have a long experience of a particular change blindness display are compelled to look at the location of the expected change even when they know that a change will not occur at the same location (Takahashi & Watanabe, 2008). Here, we investigated the types of experience that are required to form the persistent bias. Naive observers performed a typical change blindness task. Before the task, they repeatedly experienced the detection of a change in an identical display. The prior experience produced a gaze bias toward the experienced target. However, the bias decreased after the observers became aware that a change would not occur at the same location. These results suggest that prior experience immediately modulates visual search; however, repetitive detection was not sufficient for producing the persistent bias as observed in the case of vision scientists.

Key words: Change blindness, Eye movement, Prior experience, Visual search