Daniel James Simons (born 1969) is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois.
His research interests also include visual cognition, perception, memory, attention, and awareness.
[3] Professor Simons' research has focused on the cognitive underpinnings of our experience of a stable and continuous visual world.
Related studies explore what aspects of our environment automatically capture attention and what objects and events go unnoticed.
[3] In 2004, Simons and his collaborator, Christopher Chabris, won the Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that even gorillas can become invisible when people are attending to something else.