Perception, Attention and the Grand Illusion

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper looks at two puzzles raised by the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. First, how can we see at all if, in order to see, we must first perceptually attend to that which we see? Second, if attention is required for perception, why does it seem to us as if we are perceptually aware of the whole detailed visual field when it is quite clear that we do not attend to all that detail? We offer a general framework for thinking about perception and perceptual consciousness that addresses these questions and we propose, in addition, an informal account of the relation between attention and consciousness. On If you focus your attention on a basketball game-- for example, on the number of times the white team possesses the ball-- you will be unlikely to notice the person in a gorillasuit who walks across the court (Simons & Chabris, 1999). This is an example of what Mack and Rock (1998) call "inattentional blindness " (IB). This term calls to mind what

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 87 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.