Vis keynote address: Failures of visual awareness

How much of our visual world do we really see? Recent studies of how people perceive and remember the visual world have revealed striking failures of visual awareness. For example, people often fail to notice large changes to visual scenes when those changes occur during a brief disruption or distraction. Such failures of awareness suggest that we perceive far less of our surroundings than we might otherwise think. And, this disparity between what we see and what we think we see can have striking real-world consequences. This talk will give numerous examples of such failures of awareness, illustrating how the mechanisms and limitations of visual attention constrain what we see. It will also discuss the positive functional role of attention in performance, noting how failures of awareness are a necessary (albeit unfortunate) byproduct of human visual perception.