Arien Mack

Who they are

This page is deliberately short. The material the Why We Project has checked for Mack is bibliographic: what she published, with whom, and what those publications are known for. It does not include a biography.

Mack is the fourth author of Perception without attention: results of a new method, published in Cognitive Psychology in 1992 with Irvin Rock, Christopher Linnett and Paul Grant. She is first author of the 1998 book Inattentional Blindness, written with Rock and published by MIT Press.

Credit for the term inattentional blindness goes to Mack and Rock because the book carries it as its title. The better-known gorilla experiment of Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, published in Perception in 1999, belongs to the literature that followed and uses the term the book established.

Key papers

Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional Blindness. MIT Press. The book whose title is the name of the phenomenon.

Rock, I., Linnett, C. M., Grant, P., & Mack, A. (1992). Perception without attention: results of a new method. Cognitive Psychology, 24(4), 502-534. The paper that introduced the method. The Why We Project cites it for that fact only.

Key ideas

The phenomenon of failing to notice an unexpected object in plain view while attention is on another task has a name, and the name is hers and Rock's.

A method for studying perception without attention was introduced in 1992, six years before the book.

Later work on the effect, including the radiology and walking studies, builds on the term and the method.

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