Donald David Hoffman (born December 29, 1955) is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author.

Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception, and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments.

He was briefly a Research Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT, and then became an assistant professor at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) in 1983.

He has remained on the faculty of UCI since then, with a sabbatical during the 1995-1996 academic year at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung of Bielefeld University.

Hoffman notes that the commonly held view that brain activity causes conscious experience has, so far, proved to be intractable in terms of scientific explanation.

Similarly, objects that we perceive in time and space are metaphorical icons that act as our interface to the world and enable us to function as efficiently as possible without having to deal with the overwhelming amount of data underlying reality.

[5] The interface theory of perception is the idea that our perceptual experiences don't necessarily map onto what exists in the reality of itself.

This is in contrast to the popular view of critical realism, which argues that some of our perceptual experiences map onto the reality of the natural world.

This led him to argue that evolution has developed sensory systems in organisms that have high fitness but don't offer a correct perception of reality.