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Daniel J Simons

Professor

Research Interests

Visual cognition, attention, perception, memory, research methods and practices, statistics, change blindness, inattentional blindness, metacognition & intuition

Joining my laboratory: I likely will accept new students in the Master of Science in Psychological Science program for Fall of 2025 if they are a good fit for my laboratory. I will review applications for the Ph.D. program, but I do not know whether or not I will take new Ph.D. students for Fall of 2025. I don't currently have any openings for new undergraduate research assistants in my lab (I usually take new undergraduate research assistants at the start of the fall semester each year). Please email me if you have interest in joining my laboratory.

Research Description

Visual cognition, perception, attention, and memory. Most of my recent 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 inattentional blindness - 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 my 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 our findings.

Education

  • Ph.D. from Cornell University
  • B.A. from Carleton College

Additional Campus Affiliations

Professor, Psychology
Professor, Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising
Professor, Business Administration

Highlighted Publications

Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (2010). The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown Publishing Group.

Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (2023). Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It. Basic Books.

View all publications on Illinois Experts

Recent Publications

Ding, Y., Simons, D. J., Hults, C. M., & Raja, R. (2024). Are Familiar Objects More Likely to Be Noticed in an Inattentional Blindness Task? Journal of Cognition, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.352

Hults, C. M., Ding, Y., Xie, G. G., Raja, R., Johnson, W., Lee, A., & Simons, D. J. (2024). Inattentional blindness in medicine. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 9(1), Article 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-024-00537-x

Simons, D. J., Hults, C. M., & Ding, Y. (2024). Individual differences in inattentional blindness. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 31(4), 1471-1502. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02431-x

Ding, Y., Hults, C. M., Raja, R., & Simons, D. J. (2023). Similarity of an unexpected object to the attended and ignored objects affects noticing in a sustained inattentional blindness task. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 85(7), 2150-2169. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02794-2

Halewicz, V., & Simons, D. J. (2023). Precision of Memory for Attended and Ignored Colors. Collabra: Psychology, 9(1), Article 87484. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.87484

View all publications on Illinois Experts