Welcome Boston Globe Readers

This page provides information about the research described in Drake Bennett's article. This page is provided so that you can learn about the original science and videos described in the book. It includes a link to the original video (for viewing purposes only) as well as links to other information about his lab and research.

Visit to the Visual Cognition Lab
This link takes you to the Visual Cognition Laboratory website 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 article. 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.

Read a Scholarpedia.org article on inattentional blindness
This link takes you to a Scholarpedia.org article (a peer-reviewed science wiki) on inattentional blindness that Prof. Simons wrote. It provides a review of the science underlying this phenomenon, written for a general audience.

View the "door" video
This link takes you to the a video from the "door" experiment by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin that was described in the article. 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.

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. The complete reference for the door study is Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5, 644-649.