Kantor Speaker Daniel Simons: “Missing What’s Missing…”

Denison University Psychology Department welcomes Kantor Speaker Professor of Psychology and head of the Visual Cognitions Lab at University of Illinois Daniel Simons, presenting “Missing What’s Missing…”

We all have intuitive beliefs about the workings of our own mind, and those beliefs are firmly grounded in our daily experiences; we believe we see the world as it is and that we know why we see it the way we do.

Yet, our experiences can be misleading,fostering illusions about our cognitive abilities and delusions about the richness of our understanding. Simon draws on research from visual perception, attention, and metacognition to illustrate how the unnoticed limits of our own minds affect what we see and think.

The talk will focus on failures of awareness and the limits of our mind.

Simon’s research explores the limits of awareness and memory, the reasons why we often are unaware of those limits, and the implications of such limits for our personal and professional lives. In 2010, he and his colleague Christopher Chabris co-authored the New York Times bestseller, “The Invisible Gorilla.”