Daniel J Simons
Biographic Data
| ID | 1751962 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel J Simons |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel J |
| FAMILY NAME | Simons |
| SIGNATURE | SIMONS D J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7545-1621 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Action mismatches across movie edits minimally impact perceived smoothness and change detection
Individual differences in inattentional blindness
A reproducible systematic map of research on the illusory truth effect
People believe information more if they have encountered it before, a finding known as the illusory truth effect . But what is the evidence for the generality and pervasiveness of the illusory truth effect? Our preregistered systematic map describes the existing knowledge base and objectively assesses the quality, completeness and interpretability of the evidence provided by empirical studies in the literature. A systematic search of 16 bibliogra…
No Evidence That Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth
Williams and Bargh (2008) reported that holding a hot cup of coffee caused participants to judge a person's personality as warmer and that holding a therapeutic heat pad caused participants to choose rewards for other people rather than for themselves. These experiments featured large effects ( r = .28 and .31), small sample sizes (41 and 53 participants), and barely statistically significant results. We attempted to replicate both experiments in…
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Author Correction
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper
Constraints on Generality (COG)
Psychological scientists draw inferences about populations based on samples—of people, situations, and stimuli—from those populations. Yet, few papers identify their target populations, and even fewer justify how or why the tested samples are representative of broader populations. A cumulative science depends on accurately characterizing the generality of findings, but current publishing standards do not require authors to constrain their inferen…
Do Easterners and Westerners Differ in Visual Cognition? A Preregistered Examination of Three Visual Cognition Tasks
When performing cognitive tasks, Easterners often process information more holistically and contextually than Westerners. This is often taken as evidence for fundamental differences in basic cognition, including attention and perception. Yet, evidence for such basic cognitive differences is inconsistent, many studies are based on small samples, and few have been replicated. We report a preregistered replication of three prominent findings of cult…
Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work?
In 2014, two groups of scientists published open letters on the efficacy of brain-training interventions, or “brain games,” for improving cognition. The first letter, a consensus statement from an international group of more than 70 scientists, claimed that brain games do not provide a scientifically grounded way to improve cognitive functioning or to stave off cognitive decline. Several months later, an international group of 133 scientists and …
Does working memory capacity predict cross-modally induced failures of awareness
Using Mechanical Turk to Assess the Effects of Age and Spatial Proximity on Inattentional Blindness
Few studies have used online data collection to study cognitive aging. We used a large (N = 515) online sample to replicate the findings that inattentional blindness increases with age and with the distance of the unexpected object from the focus of attention. Critically, we assessed whether distance moderates the relationship between age and noticing. We replicated both age and distance effects, but found no age by distance interaction. These fi…
The Value of Direct Replication
Reproducibility is the cornerstone of science. If an effect is reliable, any competent researcher should be able to obtain it when using the same procedures with adequate statistical power. Two of the articles in this special section question the value of direct replication by other laboratories. In this commentary, I discuss the problematic implications of some of their assumptions and argue that direct replication by multiple laboratories is th…
The Pervasive Problem With Placebos in Psychology
To draw causal conclusions about the efficacy of a psychological intervention, researchers must compare the treatment condition with a control group that accounts for improvements caused by factors other than the treatment. Using an active control helps to control for the possibility that improvement by the experimental group resulted from a placebo effect. Although active control groups are superior to “no-contact” controls, only when the active…
The effects of video game playing on attention, memory, and executive control
What You See Is What You Set
This article reports a theoretical and experimental attempt to relate and contrast 2 traditionally separate research programs: inattentional blindness and attention capture. Inattentional blindness refers to failures to notice unexpected objects and events when attention is otherwise engaged. Attention capture research has traditionally used implicit indices (e.g., response times) to investigate automatic shifts of attention. Because attention ca…
Change blindness
Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change Blindness
Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm
People often have difficulty detecting visual changes in scenes, a phenomenon referred to as 'change blindness'. Although change blindness is usually observed in pictures of objects that are not the focus of attention, it also occurs for attended objects in the real world. Here, we further explore the finding that many participants fail to detect the unexpected substitution of one conversation partner for another. We show that change blindness fo…
Gorillas in our midst
Gorillas in Our Midst
With each eye fixation, we experience a richly detailed visual world. Yet recent work on visual integration and change direction reveals that we are surprisingly unaware of the details of our environment from one view to the next: we often do not detect large changes to objects and scenes (‘change blindness’). Furthermore, without attention, we may not even perceive objects (‘inattentional blindness’). Taken together, these findings suggest that …
Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction
Change blindness
Spatiotemporal continuity, smoothness of motion and object identity in infancy
A preferential looking method served to investigate 4-month-old infants' apprehension of the identity of objects over successive encounters. In Expts 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with events in which objects moved either continuously or discontinuously behind two narrow screens. Subsequent looking times to one- vs. two-object displays provided evidence that infants apprehend object identity in accord with the principle that objects move con…
Spatiotemporal continuity, smoothness of motion and object identity in infancy
A preferential looking method served to investigate 4-month-old infants' apprehension of the identity of objects over successive encounters. In Expts 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with events in which objects moved either continuously or discontinuously behind two narrow screens. Subsequent looking times to one- vs. two-object displays provided evidence that infants apprehend object identity in accord with the principle that objects move con…
No Evidence That Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth
Williams and Bargh (2008) reported that holding a hot cup of coffee caused participants to judge a person's personality as warmer and that holding a therapeutic heat pad caused participants to choose rewards for other people rather than for themselves. These experiments featured large effects ( r = .28 and .31), small sample sizes (41 and 53 participants), and barely statistically significant results. We attempted to replicate both experiments in…
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm
People often have difficulty detecting visual changes in scenes, a phenomenon referred to as 'change blindness'. Although change blindness is usually observed in pictures of objects that are not the focus of attention, it also occurs for attended objects in the real world. Here, we further explore the finding that many participants fail to detect the unexpected substitution of one conversation partner for another. We show that change blindness fo…
Spatiotemporal continuity, smoothness of motion and object identity in infancy
A preferential looking method served to investigate 4-month-old infants' apprehension of the identity of objects over successive encounters. In Expts 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with events in which objects moved either continuously or discontinuously behind two narrow screens. Subsequent looking times to one- vs. two-object displays provided evidence that infants apprehend object identity in accord with the principle that objects move con…
Change blindness
Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction
Gorillas in our midst
Gorillas in Our Midst
With each eye fixation, we experience a richly detailed visual world. Yet recent work on visual integration and change direction reveals that we are surprisingly unaware of the details of our environment from one view to the next: we often do not detect large changes to objects and scenes (‘change blindness’). Furthermore, without attention, we may not even perceive objects (‘inattentional blindness’). Taken together, these findings suggest that …
Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change Blindness
Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm
People often have difficulty detecting visual changes in scenes, a phenomenon referred to as 'change blindness'. Although change blindness is usually observed in pictures of objects that are not the focus of attention, it also occurs for attended objects in the real world. Here, we further explore the finding that many participants fail to detect the unexpected substitution of one conversation partner for another. We show that change blindness fo…
What You See Is What You Set
This article reports a theoretical and experimental attempt to relate and contrast 2 traditionally separate research programs: inattentional blindness and attention capture. Inattentional blindness refers to failures to notice unexpected objects and events when attention is otherwise engaged. Attention capture research has traditionally used implicit indices (e.g., response times) to investigate automatic shifts of attention. Because attention ca…
Change blindness
The effects of video game playing on attention, memory, and executive control
The Pervasive Problem With Placebos in Psychology
To draw causal conclusions about the efficacy of a psychological intervention, researchers must compare the treatment condition with a control group that accounts for improvements caused by factors other than the treatment. Using an active control helps to control for the possibility that improvement by the experimental group resulted from a placebo effect. Although active control groups are superior to “no-contact” controls, only when the active…
The Value of Direct Replication
Reproducibility is the cornerstone of science. If an effect is reliable, any competent researcher should be able to obtain it when using the same procedures with adequate statistical power. Two of the articles in this special section question the value of direct replication by other laboratories. In this commentary, I discuss the problematic implications of some of their assumptions and argue that direct replication by multiple laboratories is th…
Using Mechanical Turk to Assess the Effects of Age and Spatial Proximity on Inattentional Blindness
Few studies have used online data collection to study cognitive aging. We used a large (N = 515) online sample to replicate the findings that inattentional blindness increases with age and with the distance of the unexpected object from the focus of attention. Critically, we assessed whether distance moderates the relationship between age and noticing. We replicated both age and distance effects, but found no age by distance interaction. These fi…
Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work?
In 2014, two groups of scientists published open letters on the efficacy of brain-training interventions, or “brain games,” for improving cognition. The first letter, a consensus statement from an international group of more than 70 scientists, claimed that brain games do not provide a scientifically grounded way to improve cognitive functioning or to stave off cognitive decline. Several months later, an international group of 133 scientists and …
Does working memory capacity predict cross-modally induced failures of awareness
Constraints on Generality (COG)
Psychological scientists draw inferences about populations based on samples—of people, situations, and stimuli—from those populations. Yet, few papers identify their target populations, and even fewer justify how or why the tested samples are representative of broader populations. A cumulative science depends on accurately characterizing the generality of findings, but current publishing standards do not require authors to constrain their inferen…
Do Easterners and Westerners Differ in Visual Cognition? A Preregistered Examination of Three Visual Cognition Tasks
When performing cognitive tasks, Easterners often process information more holistically and contextually than Westerners. This is often taken as evidence for fundamental differences in basic cognition, including attention and perception. Yet, evidence for such basic cognitive differences is inconsistent, many studies are based on small samples, and few have been replicated. We report a preregistered replication of three prominent findings of cult…
No Evidence That Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth
Williams and Bargh (2008) reported that holding a hot cup of coffee caused participants to judge a person's personality as warmer and that holding a therapeutic heat pad caused participants to choose rewards for other people rather than for themselves. These experiments featured large effects ( r = .28 and .31), small sample sizes (41 and 53 participants), and barely statistically significant results. We attempted to replicate both experiments in…
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Author Correction
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper
A reproducible systematic map of research on the illusory truth effect
People believe information more if they have encountered it before, a finding known as the illusory truth effect . But what is the evidence for the generality and pervasiveness of the illusory truth effect? Our preregistered systematic map describes the existing knowledge base and objectively assesses the quality, completeness and interpretability of the evidence provided by empirical studies in the literature. A systematic search of 16 bibliogra…
Individual differences in inattentional blindness
Action mismatches across movie edits minimally impact perceived smoothness and change detection
Psychology (21 works) · Cognitive psychology (17 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Cognition (11 works) · Perception (10 works) · Blindness (9 works) · Inattentional blindness (9 works) · Change blindness (8 works) · Neuroscience (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)