“It is now well-known that the absence of attention can leave us ‘blind’ to visual stimuli that are very obvious under normal viewing conditions (e.g. a person dressed as a gorilla; simons & chabris, 1999). however, the question of whether hearing can ever be susceptible to such effects remains open. here, we present evidence that the absence of attention can leave people ‘deaf’ to the presence of an ‘auditory gorilla’ which is audible for 19. s and clearly noticeable under full attention. these findings provide the first ever demonstration of sustained inattentional deafness. the effect is all the more surprising because it occurs within a lifelike, three-dimensional auditory scene in which the unnoticed stimulus moves through the middle of several other dynamic auditory stimuli. © 2012 elsevier b.v.”

“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 we perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive focused attention. in this paper, we briefly review and discuss evidence for these cognitive forms of ‘blindness’. we then present a new study that builds on classic studies of divided visual attention to examine inattentional blindness for complex objects and events in dynamic scenes. our results suggest that the likelihood of noticing an unexpected object depends on the similarity of that object to other objects in the display and on how difficult the priming monitoring task is. interestingly, spatial proximity of the critical unattended object to attended locations does not appear to affect detection, suggesting that observers attend to objects and events, not spatial positions. we discuss the implications of these results for visual representations and awareness of our visual environment.”