Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it. Many people believe that merely by opening their eyes, they see everything in their field of view; in fact, a line of psychological research has been taken as evidence of the existence of so-called preattentional perception. In Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no such thing—that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it. The authors present a narrative chronicle of their research. Thus, the reader follows the trail that led to the final conclusions, learning why initial hypotheses and explanations were discarded or revised, and how new questions arose along the way. The phenomenon of inattentional blindness has theoretical importance for cognitive psychologists studying perception, attention, and consciousness, as well as for philosophers and neuroscientists interested in the problem of consciousness. Bradford Books imprint

Surprising as it may seem, research shows that we rarely see what we are looking at unless our attention is directed to it. This phenomenon can have serious life-and-death consequences. Although the inextricable link between perceiving and attending was noted long ago by Aristotle, this phenomenon, now called inattentional blindness (IB), only recently has been named and carefully studied. Among the many questions that have been raised about IB are questions about the fate of the clearly visible, yet unseen stimuli, whether any stimuli reliably capture attention, and, if so, what they have in common. Finally, is IB an instance of rapid forgetting, or is it a failure to perceive?

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract