Daniel James Simons (born 1969) is an

experimental psychologist Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, in ...

, cognitive scientist, and Professor in the Department of Psychology and the

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dedicated to interdisciplinary research. A gift from scientist, businessman, and philanthropist Arnold O. Beckman (1900–2004) an ...

at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

. Simons is best known for his work on change blindness and

inattentional blindness Inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness (rarely called ''inattentive blindness'') occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects o ...

, two surprising examples of how people can be unaware of information right in front of their eyes. His research interests also include visual cognition,

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered ...

, attention, and

awareness Awareness is the state of being conscious of something. More specifically, it is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events. Another definition describes it as a state wherein a subject is aware of some infor ...

Biography

Career

Simons received a B.A. in psychology from Carleton College in 1991 and a Ph.D. from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

in 1997. Simons then spent 5 years at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, first as an Assistant professor and then as a John Loeb Associate Professor. In 2002, Simons became a Professor at the

where he runs the Visual Cognition Laboratory.Daniel J. Simons - Profile. Beckman Institute Directory
Accessed 2010-05-19

Research

Professor Simons' research has focused on the cognitive underpinnings of our experience of a stable and continuous visual world. One line of research focuses on change blindness. These failures to notice large changes to scenes suggest that we are aware of far less of our visual world than we think. Related studies explore what aspects of our environment automatically capture attention and what objects and events go unnoticed. Such studies reveal the surprising extent of

- the failure to notice unusual and salient events in their visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected. Other active research interests include scene perception, object recognition, visual memory, visual fading, attention, and driving and distraction. Research in his laboratory adopts methods ranging from real-world and video-based approaches to computer-based psychophysical techniques, and it includes basic behavioral measures, eye tracking, simulator studies, and training studies. This diversity of approaches helps establish closer links between basic research on the mechanisms of attention and the real-world implications and consequences of the findings.

Awards

In 2003, Simons won the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology. He was also an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1999 to 2003. In 2004, Simons and his collaborator, Christopher Chabris, won the

Ig Nobel Prize The Ig Nobel Prize ( ) is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name o ...

for demonstrating that even gorillas can become invisible when people are attending to something else.Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize
Accessed 2010-05-19 Throughout his career, Simons has also been awarded numerous teaching and mentoring awards for his dedication to quality undergraduate and graduate education.

References

Books

* '' The Invisible Gorilla'' (2010) * '' Change Blindness and Visual Memory'' (2000)

Articles and essays

*
Daniel J Simons' Reprint Archive

Scholarpedia entry on inattentional blindness written by Simons

External links

Daniel Simons's website

The SimonsLab website

University of Illinois Listing

The Invisible Gorilla blog

Daniel Simons's blog

Demos

Basketball Video

Monkey Business Illusion

{{DEFAULTSORT:Simons, Daniel 1969 births Living people American psychologists University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Cornell University alumni Carleton College alumni