Many people believe that simply 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. This book makes 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 consciosness.