Irvin Rock

Irvin Rock

Irvin Rock was a psychologist and the first author of a 1992 Cognitive Psychology paper that introduced a new method for studying perception without attention. With Arien Mack he wrote the 1998 book Inattentional Blindness, which gave the phenomenon its name. The name is the main reason he appears in later work on attention, including the gorilla video of 1999.

Who they are

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

Rock appears as first author of the 1992 paper Perception without attention: results of a new method, with Christopher Linnett, Paul Grant and Arien Mack, in Cognitive Psychology, volume 24, issue 4. Six years later he and Mack published Inattentional Blindness with MIT Press. The two works are the basis for crediting Mack and Rock with the term, and they are the sources the later literature cites for it.

Because the term is theirs, their names sit upstream of the better-known experiments that followed. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, whose 1999 gorilla experiment is the usual public face of the effect, studied inattentional blindness for complex objects and events in dynamic scenes, using the vocabulary the 1998 book had fixed.

Key papers

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.

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

Key ideas

Perception without attention can be studied with a method built for the purpose. The 1992 paper presented one.

The phenomenon has a name. The 1998 book fixed it, and the field has used it since.

The credit for the term belongs with Mack and Rock, whatever later demonstration made it famous.

Sources

  1. Rock, I., Linnett, C. M., Grant, P., & Mack, A. (1992). Perception without attention: results of a new method. Cognitive Psychology, 24(4), 502-534. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(92)90017-V.
  2. Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional Blindness. MIT Press.
  3. Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059-1074. doi:10.1068/p281059.