This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Daniel Simons is the head of Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois. His recent research explores the cognitive underpinnings of our experience of a stable and continuous visual world. For example, his studies reveal the surprising extent of inattentional blindness — the failure to notice unusual and salient events when attention is otherwise engaged and when the events are unexpected. More broadly, he tries to identify those aspects of our environment that automatically capture attention and those that go unnoticed. Other active research interests include scene perception, object recognition, visual memory, visual fading, attention, driving and distraction. His laboratory adopts methods ranging from real-world and video-based approaches to computer-based psycho-physical techniques.