Visual perception plays a critical role in detecting changes within immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environments. However, as visual complexity increases, perceptual performance declines, making it more difficult to detect changes quickly and accurately. This study examines how visual features, known for facilitating preattentive processing, impact a change detection task in immersive 3D environments, with a focus on visual complexity, object attributes, and spatial proximity. Our results demonstrate that preattentive processing enhances change detection, particularly when the altered object is spatially isolated and not perceptually grouped with similar surrounding objects. Changes to isolated objects were detected more reliably, suggesting that perceptual isolation reduces cognitive load and draws more attention. Conversely, when a changed object was surrounded by visually similar elements, participants were less likely to detect the change, indicating that perceptual grouping hinders individual object recognition in complex scenes. These results provide guidelines for designing VR applications that strategically utilize spatial isolation and visual features to improve the user experience.

翻译：视觉感知在沉浸式虚拟现实环境中检测变化方面起着关键作用。然而，随着视觉复杂度的增加，感知性能会下降，使得快速准确地检测变化变得更加困难。本研究探讨了已知有助于预注意处理的视觉特征如何影响沉浸式3D环境中的变化检测任务，重点关注视觉复杂度、对象属性和空间邻近性。我们的结果表明，预注意处理增强了变化检测，尤其是当被改变的对象在空间上孤立且未与周围相似对象形成感知分组时。对孤立对象的变化检测更为可靠，这表明感知隔离减少了认知负荷并吸引了更多注意力。相反，当一个被改变的对象被视觉上相似的元素包围时，参与者检测到变化的可能性较低，这表明感知分组在复杂场景中阻碍了个体对象的识别。这些结果为设计VR应用提供了指导，以策略性地利用空间隔离和视觉特征来改善用户体验。