Daniel Simons | |
---|---|
Alma mater | PhD Cornell University BA Carleton College |
Known for | "Gorillas in Our Midst" |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychology change blindness inattentional blindness Visual attention Visual perception |
Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Harvard University |
Doctoral advisor | Frank Keil |
Daniel James Simons (born 1969) is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. [1]
Simons is best known for his work on change blindness and inattentional blindness, two surprising examples of how people can be unaware of information right in front of their eyes. His research interests also include visual cognition, perception, memory, attention, and awareness. [2]
Simons received a B.A. in psychology from Carleton College in 1991 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1997. Simons then spent 5 years at Harvard University, first as an Assistant professor and then as a John Loeb Associate Professor. In 2002, Simons became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he runs the Visual Cognition Laboratory. [3]
Professor Simons' research has focused on the cognitive underpinnings of our experience of a stable and continuous visual world. One line of research focuses on change blindness. These failures to notice large changes to scenes suggest that we are aware of far less of our visual world than we think. Related studies explore what aspects of our environment automatically capture attention and what objects and events go unnoticed. Such studies reveal the surprising extent of inattentional blindness - the failure to notice unusual and salient events in their visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected. Other active research interests include scene perception, object recognition, visual memory, visual fading, attention, and driving and distraction. Research in his laboratory adopts methods ranging from real-world and video-based approaches to computer-based psychophysical techniques, and it includes basic behavioral measures, eye tracking, simulator studies, and training studies.[ citation needed ]
In 2003, Simons won the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology. He was also an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1999 to 2003. [3] In 2004, Simons and his collaborator, Christopher Chabris, won the Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that even gorillas can become invisible when people are attending to something else. [4]
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
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Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions, such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.
Christopher F. Chabris is an American research psychologist, currently Senior Investigator (Professor) at Geisinger Health System, visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France, and associate professor of Psychology and co-director of the Neuroscience Program at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He is best known as the co-author of the popular science book The Invisible Gorilla, which presents the results of research into attention and other cognitive illusions.
The 2007 Zell am See mid-air collision was an aviation accident that occurred on 5 March 2007, at 10:53 a.m. CET (09:53 UTC), in which eight people died when an Aérospatiale SA 332 Super Puma helicopter, operated by Helog, collided with a private Diamond DV20 Katana light aircraft near Zell am See, Austria.
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Avishai Henik is an Israeli neurocognitive psychologist who works at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Henik studies voluntary and automatic (non-voluntary/reflexive) processes involved in cognitive operations. He characterizes automatic processes, and clarifies their importance, the relationship between automatic and voluntary processes, and their neural underpinnings. Most of his work involves research with human participants and in recent years, he has been working with Archer fish to examine evolutionary aspects of various cognitive functions.
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