"This may be one of those rare instances where a single body of work (and in a seemingly overstudied area), almost single-handedly, can overturn prevailing ideas. This type of work helps to elevate the discipline of experimental psychology to its deserved place in understanding the mind and brain."
-- Ken Nakayama, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

Many people believe that merely by opening their eyes, they see everything in their field of view; in fact, a line of psychological research has been taken as evidence of the existence of so-called preattentional perception. In Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no such thing--that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

The authors present a narrative chronicle of their research. Thus, the reader follows the trail that led to the final conclusions, learning why initial hypotheses and explanations were discarded or revised, and how new questions arose along the way. The phenomenon of inattentional blindness has theoretical importance for cognitive psychologists studying perception, attention, and consciousness, as well as for philosophers and neuroscientists interested in the problem of consciousness.