"Wasn't He Wearing a Jacket?" Visual Cognition Expert to Speak Dec. 7

Daniel Simons, professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, will speak on “Failures of Visual Awareness” at 2 p.m. Friday, Dec. 7, in DeGarmo 48.  Admission is free and open to the public.

Simons is head of the Visual Cognition Lab in the U of I’s division of Visual Cognition and Human Performance.   His research is in large part responsible for the recent rush of scientific interest in the finding that people are basically blind to many things that happen right before their very eyes.  This phenomenon is known as “change blindness.”

Simons and other researchers state that people often fail to notice large changes to visual scenes when those changes occur during a brief disruption or distraction.  For example, people watching a movie scene of two people sitting at a table talking, and one person is wearing a jacket.  If the shot changes to a close-up and goes back to the original scene and the same person is wearing a sweater, most people would not recognize that changed detail.  In his lecture, Simons will discuss various failures of visual awareness and what those failures imply (and do not imply) about our capacity to perceive, attend to and remember our visual world.