Welcome Readers of Alex Boese's "Elephants on Acid, and other strange experiments"

This page provides links to information about Professor Daniel Simons' experiments on visual awareness that were described in Alex Boese's book "Elephants on Acid, and other strange experiments." From here you can visit to the Visual Cognition Laboratory web site and view videos from Prof. Simons' research.

Visit to the Visual Cognition Lab
This link takes you to the Visual Cognition Laboratory web site where you can learn about Professor Simons's research, lab members, publications, and much more.

Visit the Beckman Institute Home Page
The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is an interdisciplinary research institute devoted to basic research in the physical sciences, computation, engineering, biology, behavior, and cognition. It is home to the Visual Cognition Laboratory.

View the "basketball" video
This link takes you to the basketball video from an experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris that was described in the book. To view the video, you will need to have Java active in your browser. When viewing the video, try to count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black. When you're done, visit the main lab web site for more information. Please note that this video is copyrighted and is available on this web site for viewing purposes only -- it may not be downloaded, copied, saved or used for any other purpose. If you are interested in using this video in any other context, it is available on DVD from Viscog Productions, Inc. (Note that the University of Illinois is not in any way affiliated with Viscog Productions and this link does not represent an endorsement of Viscog Productions or its products by the University.)

See videos from other experiments
Prof. Simons has conducted a number of studies of attention, perception, and memory. This link takes you to the Visual Cognition Laboratory demos page where you can view other videos from his reseach. Please note that all of the videos on the demos page are copyrighted and are available on this web site for viewing purposes only -- they may not be downloaded, copied, or saved or used for any other purpose.

Request a reprint
This link takes you to the Visual Cognition Laboratory reprint archive where you can request a reprint of many of Prof. Simons' publications. Here you can request a copy of the journal article about the "basketball" studies and our other papers. The complete reference for the basketball article is:
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). "Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events." Perception, 28, 1059-1074.