Research Interests
Visual cognition, attention, perception, memory, research methods and practices, statistics, change blindness, inattentional blindness, metacognition & intuition
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, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
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.
Recent Publications
Henderson, E. L., Westwood, S. J., & Simons, D. J. (2022). A reproducible systematic map of research on the illusory truth effect. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 29(3), 1065-1088. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01995-w
Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., Nilsonne, G., Van Den Akker, O. R., Albers, C. J., Van Assen, M. A., Bastiaansen, J. A., Benjamin, D., Boehm, U., Botvinik-Nezer, R., Bringmann, L. F., Busch, N. A., Caruyer, E., Cataldo, A. M., Cowan, N., Delios, A., Van Dongen, N. N., Donkin, C., Van Doorn, J. B., ... Wagenmakers, E. J. (2021). Consensus-based guidance for conducting and reporting multi-analyst studies. eLife, 10, [e72185]. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72185
Henderson, E. L., Simons, D. J., & Barr, D. J. (2021). The trajectory of truth: A longitudinal study of the illusory truth effect. Journal of Cognition, 4(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.5334/JOC.161
Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., Sarafoglou, A., Kekecs, Z., Kucharský, Š., Benjamin, D., Chambers, C. D., Fisher, A., Gelman, A., Gernsbacher, M. A., Ioannidis, J. P., Johnson, E., Jonas, K., Kousta, S., Lilienfeld, S. O., Lindsay, D. S., Morey, C. C., Munafò, M., Newell, B. R., ... Wagenmakers, E. J. (2020). A consensus-based transparency checklist. Nature human behaviour, 4(1), 4-6. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0772-6
Pailian, H., Simons, D. J., Wetherhold, J., & Halberda, J. (2020). Using the flicker task to estimate visual working memory storage capacity. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 82(3), 1271-1289. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01809-1