Dan Simons of the Human Perception and Performance group likes to have fun with his research. While at Harvard he completed the now-famous “Gorillas in our Midst” study in which half of the test subjects failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit wandering through a video scene. For the 2005 Beckman Institute Open House, Simons used a large spinning disco ball to render visitors to the exhibit temporarily blind to a large poster of Abraham Lincoln. Don’t be fooled by the fun, however. While Simons has developed some striking and entertaining demonstrations, he has also done groundbreaking research into failures in visual awareness.
Simons is an associate professor in the University of Illinois’s Department of Psychology and a full-time faculty member at the Beckman Institute. As head of the Visual Cognition Laboratory, his research interests include visual cognition, attention, perception, and memory. Simons has focused on change blindness (defined as failing to notice big changes in scenes, in photos, or in the real world) and inattentional blindness (what happens when attention is diverted away from an unexpected target object– such as a chest-thumping gorilla). In the “gorilla” study, test subjects were so focused on counting the number of times basketballs were passed around that half of them missed the gorilla. “We wanted to show that you can miss something large and distinctive even when it is right in front of you for a long time,” Simons said.
The study was just one part of Simons’ research on the links between attention and visual perception. “Basically what you attend to is what you consciously perceive,” Simons said. “To see something, you need to do more than direct your eyes at it – you actually have to focus attention on it.”
Failures in visual awareness are particularly common when automobile drivers hit motorcycles; the drivers often report never having seen the motorcycle. “Drivers are expecting cars, not motorcycles. They might look right at the motorcycle but not see it because it’s unexpected,” Simons said.
Simons has won many awards and honors for his work but the gorilla study earned him extra attention in 2004 when he won the Ig Nobel Psychology Prize, given for research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.” Simons accepted the award in the spirit it was given. “I’ve always loved the Ig Nobels,” he said. “They show that science can be fun as well as rigorous – that’s a good thing.”