In inattentional blindness, people fail to report visible stimuli when their attention is elsewhere, famously missing a gorilla. However, the standard measure—asking if they noticed anything unusual—may be biased. In the largest set of inattentional blindness studies to date, participants who denied noticing a stimulus could still report its location, color, and shape, showing that perceptual information remains accessible. Introducing absent trials revealed that observers are biased to report not noticing, essentially playing it safe. These findings provide the strongest evidence yet of significant residual visual sensitivity in inattentional blindness and challenge the claim that awareness requires attention.
Perception is the primary way humans access the external world, and its nature is explored by both scientists and philosophers. Philosophers ask fundamental questions about whether senses represent the world in comparable ways, how much of the environment can be perceived at once, which aspects are objective or subjective, and what counts as perceptual. While these fields often proceed independently, a new research focus reunites them by putting long-standing philosophical questions to empirical test. This work directly tests philosophical conjectures or thought experiments in the laboratory, such that the experiments would not have proceeded without prior philosophical discussion. The review explores themes from these successful interactions and suggests further philosophical questions amenable to empirical approaches.