Daniel Simons

Daniel James Simons (born 1969) is an experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist, a professor in the Department of Psychology and at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. He is best known for his work on change blindness and inattentional blindness, which show how people can fail to notice information in plain view, and his wider interests include visual cognition, perception, memory, attention and awareness. He took a bachelor's degree at Carleton College in 1991 and a PhD at Cornell University in 1997, spent five years at Harvard, and in 2002 moved to Illinois, where he runs the Visual Cognition Laboratory. With Christopher Chabris he won the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for the invisible gorilla demonstration, and his books include The Invisible Gorilla.