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Daniel Simons

Department of Psychology
University of Illinois
603 E. Daniel St.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
Office phone: 217-333-7628
Office fax: 217-244-8371

Email: dsimons@uiuc.edu
Home page: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab




Change Detection Research Interests
My change detection research adopts both incidental and intentional approaches. Intentional tasks can be used to explore how well observers detect changes when they are effortfully searching for change -- they allow us to measure the thresholds for detection as well as the capacity of attention and visual short-term memory. Intentional change detection tasks include variants of Rensink's flicker task as well as discrete change/no-change tasks. In my research I have used both of these types of task with displays ranging from simple shapes or arrays to photographs of natural scenes. Incidental approaches can be used to study what types of change are detected when observers do not expect a change to occur. My collaborators and I have explored incidental change detection in motion picture perception and in the perception of real-world events. In general, I am interested in (a) the role of attention in successful and unsuccessful change detection; (b) what types of change draw attention; (c) whether changes can be detected in the absence of awareness; (d) what mechanisms underlie successful change detection; and (e) what mechanisms fail in change blindness. I am also interested in the implications of change blindness and change detection for the nature of our representations of our visual world and for the nature of visual integration across views.

Other Research Interests
Inattentional blindness, attentional capture, spatial cognition, spatial updating, concepts and categories

Change Detection Publications
Simons, D. J. (Ed.). (2000). Change blindness and visual memory: A special issue of Visual Cognition. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Simons, D. J. (1996). In sight, out of mind: When object representations fail. Psychological Science, 7, 301-305.

Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1997). Change blindness. Trends in Cognitive Science, 1, 261-267.

Levin, D. T., & Simons, D. J. (1997). Failure to detect changes to attended objects in motion pictures. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4, 501-506.

Simons, D. J., & Wang, R. F. (1998). Perceiving real-world viewpoint changes. Psychological Science, 9, 315-320.

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.

Wang, R. F., & Simons, D. J. (1999). Active and passive scene recognition across views. Cognition, 70, 191-210.

Levin, D. T., Momen, N., Drivdahl, S. B., & Simons, D. J. (2000). Change blindness blindness: The metacognitive error of overestimating change-detection ability. Visual Cognition: Special Issue on Change Detection and Visual Memory, 7, 397-412.

Williams, P. & Simons, D. J. (2000). Detecting changes in novel 3D objects: Effects of change magnitude, spatiotemporal continuity, and stimulus familiarity. Visual Cognition: Special Issue on Change Detection and Visual Memory, 7, 297-322.

Simons, D. J. (2000). Current approaches to change blindness. Visual Cognition: Special Issue on Change Detection and Visual Memory, 7, 1-16.

Levin, D. T., & Simons, D. J. (2000). Perceiving stability in a changing world: Combining shots and integrating views in motion pictures and the real world, Media Psychology, 2, 357-380.

Simons, D. J., Franconeri, S. L., & Reimer, R. L. (2000). Change blindness in the absence of visual disruption. Perception, 29, 1143-1154.

Mitroff, S. R., & Simons, D. J. (2001, March). Reasons for change blindness. Cognet. MIT Press, http://cognet.mit.edu/perspective/. (non-peer reviewed).

Simons, D. J., & Mitroff, S. R. (2001). The role of expectations in change detection and attentional capture. In L.R. Harris & M. Jenkin (Eds.), Vision and Attention. Springer Verlag.

Levin, D. T., Simons, D. J., Angelone, B., & Chabris, C. F. (in press). Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm. British Journal of Psychology.

Simons, D. J., Mitroff, S. R., & Franconeri, S. L. (in press). Implicit and explicit representations in scene perception. In M. Peterson & G. Rhodes (Eds.), Analytic and holistic processes in the perception of faces, objects, and scenes. JAI/Ablex.

Mitroff, S. R., & Simons, D. J. (in press). Changes are not localized before they are explicitly detected. Visual Cognition.

Simons, D. J., Mitroff, S. R., & Franconeri, S. L. (in press). Implicit and explicit representations in scene perception. In M. Peterson & G. Rhodes (Eds.), Analytic and holistic processes in the perception of faces, objects, and scenes. JAI/Ablex.

Mitroff, S. R., Simons, D. J., & Franconeri, S. L. (in press). The Siren Song of implicit change detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

Simons, D. J., Chabris, C. F., Schnur, T. T., & Levin, D. T. (in press). Evidence for preserved representations in change blindness. Consciousness and Cognition.

Simons, D. J., Wang, R. F., & Roddenberry, D. (in press). Object recognition is differentially affected by display orientation and observer viewpoint changes. Perception & Psychophysics.

Scholl, B. J., Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (in revision). Change blindness blindness: An implicit measure of a metacognitive error. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Angelone, B., Levin, D. T., & Simons, D. J. (in revision). The roles of representation and comparison failures in change blindness.




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