Many people believe that merely by opening their eyes, they see everything in their field of view; in fact, a line of psychological research has been taken as evidence of the existence of so-called preattentional perception. In Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the claim that there is no such thing - that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

The authors present a narrative chronicle of their research. Thus the reader follows the trail that led to the final conclusions, learning why initial hypotheses and explanations were discarded or revised, and how new questions arose along the way. The phenomenon of inattentional blindness has theoretical importance for cognitive psychologists studying perception, attention, and consciousness, as well as for philosophers and neuroscientists interested in the problem of consciousness.