Abstract for talk: When you look at the world around you, it appears rich and detailed. So much so, in fact, that you might have the impression that you have constant access to all of that information. That impression turns out to be a cognitive illusion. Over the past decade, vision scientists and cognitive psychologists have (re)discovered how limited our awareness can be. For example, people often fail to notice large changes to visual scenes when those changes occur during a brief disruption or distraction, suggesting that we lacked access to the details of those scenes. What’s even more interesting, though, is that people appear unaware of these cognitive limits. In this presentation, I describe and illustrate various failures of visual awareness and I consider what these failures imply (and don't imply) about our capacity to perceive, attend to, and remember our visual world.

Suggested Readings:

Simons, D. J., & Rensink, R. A. (2005). Change blindness: Past, present, and future. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(1), 16-20. [.pdf]

Most, S. B., Scholl, B. J., Clifford, E. R., & Simons, D. J. (2005). What you see is what you set: Sustained inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness. Psychological Review, 112(1), 217-242. [.pdf]